Debts & Lessons
Will be published approx. on 1. May 2013
Book
Paperback/Softback
96 pages
978-1-890650-80-3 (ISBN)
Description
The poems in Lynn Xu's striking debut collection, Debts & Lessons, travel under the power of history's illusory engine and echo its ululations of love, violence, and lament. Named after the first part of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, this book also finds its way across oceans and between languages, as the poet looks to the dead for guidance amid the abstractions of contemporary life. Xu pays her phantoms (and her readers) with the dream-currency of hallucinatory songs, which balance her finely-tuned ear against a world of awakenings.
Reviews / Votes
"Lynn Xu makes the poetic line a little theater where the belatedness of language is felt--and sometimes lulled into suspension. [She] is an expert at multiplying sites of resonance and ambiguity, of conjoining or confusing epochs and zones." -- Ben Lerner, Boston Review "Lynn Xu's Debts & Lessons is a book of influences and emanations... Hers is a poetry of theodicy and, as she traces the features of her own face in the faces of the past, striking originality." -- Susan Stewart, author, The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making "Xu brings to mind Anne Carson and Susan Howe, especially with regard to form, and Lyn Hejinian, in her relationship to language... While she looks back at her forebears, Xu gives fans of contemporary experimental poetry much to love." -- Publishers Weekly (18 March 2013)More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Richmond, CA
United States
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight
173 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-890650-80-3 (9781890650803)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
LYNN XU was born in Shanghai. Her poems have appeared in 6x6, 1913, Best American Poetry 2008, Boston Review, Octopus, Poor Claudia, and others. A chapbook, June, was published by Corollary Press in 2006. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a William L. Magistretti Fellowship, she is currently the Jacob K. Javits Fellow at UC Berkeley, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. She holds an MFA from Brown University. With Robyn Schiff, Nick Twemlow, and husband Joshua Edwards, she coedits Canarium Books. Between Stuttgart and Marfa, she divides her time.