Publishers Weekly
★ 07/18/2022
The restless, luminous second book from Xie (Eye Level) weaves a web of family and ancestral history, aesthetics, and intergenerational trauma. Xie begins with a cycle of poems addressing the work of photographer Li Zhensheng, which depict the atrocities of Mao’s regime and create an atmosphere of dread that permeates the collection: “The disappeared./ The executed, slender backs to the firing squad./ How close Li had to stand to acquire their expressions, close/ enough he could smell the spume of blood and of brain matter.” Poems weave back and forth in time as she visits relatives in China in the present. The final cycle of poems is an elegy for the poet’s grandmother that evokes the ways that an absence can be omnipresent: “Nowhere am I rubbing a filament of 1958 against 2020// Nowhere is there a visual shock, two years sparking an omitted detail// Somewhere a generation of faces melts onto the last generation’s// Somewhere we keep attaching to the boundless unknowable.” Xie’s detached and precise language in the earlier poems echoes the oppressive climate of the Revolution and makes the more emotionally charged poems hit harder. This is a devastating master class in subtlety. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
Xie ingeniously leverages Western prosody to expose the fracture between the ‘Asian’ and ‘American’ aspects of Asian American identity.”—Srikanth Reddy, The New York Times Book Review
“Luminous. . . . [The Rupture Tense] is a devastating master class in subtlety.”—Publishers Weekly, starred 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
"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
“Aphoristic and elegant, The Rupture Tense articulates a lucid but challenging wisdom from the interstices of our inner lives […]”—David Woo, Harriet Books
“And yet, as the collection demonstrates, in its elevated, reaching devastation, the self is always in voracious transit, heralded with transmissions and memory, cataloging and cobbling through the pervasive ligaments of distance.”—Neha Mulay, Washington Square Review
“Though it is inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin, Marianne Hirsch and Margaret Hillenbrand, as well as the poetry of Bei Dao, Daša Drndic and Etel Adnan, The Rupture Tense conducts its inquiries in its own fresh idiom.”—Jee Leong Koh, Times Literary Supplement
“Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense, like the photographs of Li Zhensheng, invites a powerful reckoning with the history of the Cultural Revolution. Her stunning language enacts a journey through an emotional landscape where we listen to the pain of the dead and the grief of those who inherited the terrible stories. These disquieting and gorgeous poems, bodies of memory, lessen ‘the distance between the seen and the known.’”—Rigoberto Gonzalez
“The Rupture Tense is a masterwork of witness. Jenny Xie preserves and visualizes a suite of vanishing memories with language so exact and precise it could sharpen a razor. Excavating long-buried legacies of the Cultural Revolution through her lyrical cascades, Xie employs stereoscopes, portable dioramas where the reader peeks through, revealing a tiny theater for the eyes. These poems brilliantly capture the discomfort and wonder of returning home to a country shorn of memory, where the soiled corners of the past remain all too evident. The Rupture Tense doesn’t just haunt—it pulls me back into singular, urgent moments until I live inside them, shaken and transformed.”—Sally Wen Mao
“With brilliant inquiry and imagination, Jenny Xie writes into what has vanished from the archives of the Cultural Revolution. . . . The Rupture Tense is innovative, stunningly precise, and heartbreaking.”—Cathy Park Hong
“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
Library Journal
★ 10/28/2022
Xie follows the National Book Award finalist Eye Level with a remarkable collection that uses the photography of Li Zhensheng to examine the awful excesses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the arduous process of absorbing memory in general. As Xie deftly describes him, Li was "a government-backed photojournalist…[who] made his own theater in cellulose nitrate…. For every propagandist photograph he published, he earned eight frames of film. The photographs that would never get approved." The 30,000 negatives he hid under his floorboards were finally developed four decades after he took them, and they show us "The brutalized. The hanged. The stoned. The lashed. The suicides. The betrayed. The paranoid. The disappeared. The executed" and elsewhere "eight stripped trees matching eight individuals on their knees." In her sharply observed lines, where "memory-images spill over an unarticulated margin," Xie literally demands that we look at these prints as she does, fiercely and courageously, communicating shattering truths as she reveals the "friction from the future [that] lies in the folds." As she writes, Xie further elucidates the very act of taking pictures and the ultimate unknowability of what is past, even as she plunges into memory, taking the descent past "stale tropes…. Checkpoints of [her] own making." VERDICT 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.—Barbara Hoffert
