Xie, Jenny

Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level, winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the National Book Award, and Nowhere to Arrive. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the New Republic, Tin House, and elsewhere. Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense: Poems (Graywolf Press), Xie’s second collection, notes what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. She cracks open reverberant experiences of diasporic homecoming, state-enforced amnesia, intergenerational memory, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged. The Rupture Tense begins with poems sparked by the photography of Li Zhensheng. His negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The arc of the collection ends on an aching elegy for the poet’s grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end of the revolution.