Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Juan Felipe Herrera
Each year with its itchy blue, as the bruise of solitude reaches its expiration date. Planes and buses, guesthouse to guesthouse. I've gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight, my overreactive motion sickness. 9 p.m., Hanoi's Old Quarter: duck porridge and plum wine.
Voices outside the door come to a soft boil. For years now, I've been using the wrong palette.-from "Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season"
Jenny Xie's award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centres this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. The sensual worlds here-colours, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes-bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen. As Xie writes, "Me? I'm just here in my traveller's clothes, trying on each passing town for size." Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. Xie is a poet of extraordinary perception-both to the tangible world and to "all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach."
[Between Hanoi and Sapa there are clean slabs of rice fields and no two brick houses in a row
***
(@GraywolfPress, 3 April 2018, e-book, 80 pages, borrowed from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveLibs)
***
***
I'd never heard of the poet before but I love discovering new voices. I liked the cover. I really enjoyed all of the poems in this collection. Xie is very talented. I had real pleasure reading the poems on offer here. Xie uses a range of styles to explore a broad range of subjects using powerful imagery and the senses including colours, smells and tastes. The best poems are Rootless, Displacement, Old Wives' Tales on Which I Was Fed, Captivity and The Hunt. I'd be happy to read more of the poet's work.
