The Past

by Wendy Xu

Overview

Elegiac and searching, poems written in the long shadow of immigration

The poems in Wendy Xu's third collection, The Past, fantasize uneasily about becoming a palatable lyric record of their namesake, while ultimately working to disrupt this Westernized desire. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, Wendy Xu immigrated to the United States in 1989, three days ahead of the events of Tian'anmen Square. The Past probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, and immigration as an ongoing psychic experience without end. Moving spontaneously between lyric, fragment, prose, and subversions in "traditional" Chinese forms, the book culminates in a centerpiece series of "Tian'anmen Square sonnets" (and their subsequent erasures), to conjure up the irrepressible past, and ultimately imagine a new kind of poem: at once code and confession.

"Tian'anmen Sonnet" (dead air in air ... )

Dead air in air
The anniversary of language
holds you back against
bucolic dreaming, down stream
from here is running
a miraculous color, elegy

bursts like a ribbon in air
Thinking again of the Square today
Bold sky, passing episodes of cloud
Vegetation mutters in the Far West

A column of ghosts
going violet over time
Familiar song looping overhead
Lines pressed in air

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819580467
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

WENDY XU (Brooklyn, NY) is the author of Phrasis, named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review. She teaches writing at the New School, and serves as Poetry Editor for the arts magazine Hyperallergic.

Table of Contents

Coming to America 1

Pledge 3

My Dissent and My Love Are Woven Inside Me 5

Looking at My Father 6

A Sound Not Unlike a Bell 8

Praxis 16

Writing Home 17

Names of the River 18

The Ecstasy of Time 21

Linear Travel 22

Five Chinese Verses 23

Interim Poetics 25

Pledge 27

Inventory for Spring 28

Resident Alien 29

Twenty-First Century Words 30

Reading the Canon 31

Looking Beneath the Sentence's Wing; 1989 33

Looking Beneath the Sentence's Wing; 1999 34

After Is Not Return 35

Description, Repetition 37

Tiananmen Sonnets 39

The Past 63

A Poem on My Mother's Birthday 65

List of Forgivenesses 66

Poem About My Life 68

Wang Xin Tai Says Goodbye 69

Gu Dan 70

A Dream of Shandong 72

Elegy for Soft Things 74

Poem Beginning to Sound 75

Poem for Feeling's Sake 76

Poem for Chores 77

Breach Song 79

Why Write 80

Notes for an Opening 81

Annual Air 97

Acknowledgments 99

Notes 101

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Xu's lyricism and near-painterly control of the line are breathtaking. The Past shows us how the natural world tells of a shared history and language long after the traumas of revolution and immigration. These poems push outward at all of the seams."—Wendy S. Walters, author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal

Editorial Reviews

10/18/2021

“What can I do, except continue to demonstrate love?” asks Xu near the beginning of her ruminative third book, which includes a poem titled “My Dissent and My Love Are Woven Inside Me.” Xu, who was brought from China to America as an infant just days before the Tiananmen Square massacre, was praised for her good behavior on the airplane: “Perhaps Mom and Dad cried in lieu of me/ I had not yet known about my losing.” As an adult, the speaker of these poems feels caught between cultures, languages, the private and public, and—most vividly—past poverty and recent privilege. Her self-described “agitated bouquet of ideas” examines itself for authenticity before discovering the fallacy of that notion: “I begin to feel trapped inside the tower of white Western intellectual/ consideration/ I feel sick, and worse, ‘misunderstood’ ” (“Notes for an Opening”). Moving glimpses of family—Mom, Dad, Uncle—veer toward the abstract: “China green, the sound aspiring/ to evidentiary music but the jasmine/ takes no milk, won’t froth the way you like.” “Traditional” Chinese forms are subverted into English, and a series of erasures (“Tiananmen Square Sonnets”) give the collection formal variety and depth. These poems offer readers a memorable exploration of the “fantasy and nightmare” of “immigrant dreams.” (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Xu's lyricism and near-painterly control of the line are breathtaking. The Past shows us how the natural world tells of a shared history and language long after the traumas of revolution and immigration. These poems push outward at all of the seams."—Wendy S. Walters, author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal, Wendy S. Walters, author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal

From the Publisher