* FINALIST 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.
