Eye Level: Poems

Xie, Jenny

ISBN 10: 1555978029 / ISBN 13: 9781555978020

Published by Graywolf Press, 2018

Pages are clean and are not marred by notes or folds of any kind. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G1555978029I2N00

Synopsis:

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Juan Felipe Herrera

For years now, I've been using the wrong palette.
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.

--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 centers 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--colors, 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 traveler'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."

About the Author: Jenny Xie has published poems in Harvard Review, the Literary Review, The New Republic, Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Eye Level: Poems
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: 2018
Binding: Paperback
Condition: As New
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket