Staff Pick
Jenny Xie's The Rupture Tense is a marvel where poetry, history, and photography converge. Collapsing generational timelines, Xie's seemingly boundless forms revisit archives and family histories connected to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, finding within its enforced silences and gaps in memory the persistence of a living language that is mutable, teeming, and always "leak[ing] through." A must read for anyone with an interest in hybrid writing or documentary poetics. Recommended By Alexa W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
* LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY *
The astounding second collection by Jenny Xie, "a magician of perspective and scale" (The New Yorker)
Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory — historical, collective, personal — stains and erodes. 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 provoked by the photography of Li Zhensheng, whose negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and concludes with an aching elegy for the poet's grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end of the Revolution. This extraordinary collection records the aftershocks and long distances between those years and the present, echoing out toward the ongoing past and a trembling future.
Review
"Luminous....[The Rupture Tense] is a devastating master class in subtlety." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
“An elegy for Xie's grandmother points out, ‘Nowhere goes clean through the static of decades without hitting a nerve,’ and Xie hits nerves throughout in stunning and evocative language. Highly recommended.” Library Journal (Starred Review)
Review
"[The] poet not only peeks at her family's past and their country's history, but also explores the subversive power to be found in examining what has been concealed or overlooked." Han Zhang, The New York Times
Review
"Line after line, sentence after sentence, whenever I encounter the poetry of Jenny Xie I find myself stuck in small breathless moments of wonder at what the hell she just did." Literary Hub
Review
"Xie is a master of cutting wit, and she uses verb tenses and parts of speech as an extended metaphor for things left unsaid." Joanna Acevedo, Hong Kong Review
About the Author
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level, a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award and winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Bard College and lives in New York City.