The Rupture Tense: Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781644452011)

* 2023 PEN OAKLAND JOSEPHINE MILES BOOK AWARD WINNER *
* FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY *
* FINALIST FOR THE 2023 BALCONES PRIZE 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.

Author: Jenny Xie
ISBN-10: 1644452014
ISBN-13: 9781644452011
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Language: English
Published: 09/20/2022
Pages: 120
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.42lbs
Size: 8.95h x 6.54w x 0.33d
Award: National Book Awards - Finalist

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 07/01/2022 pg. 12
Publishers Weekly 07/18/2022
Library Journal 10/28/2022 pg. 1