Jenny Xie (CRF 2018) recently spoke with the New York Times about her latest poetry collection, The Rupture Tense.
“The poet not only peeks at her family’s past and their country’s history, but also explores the subversive power to be found in examining what has been concealed or overlooked: Li [Zhensheng’s long-hidden photographic archive of the Chinese Cultural Revolution], the older generations’ silence about the past, and the unexamined trauma that goes on shaping how family members relate to one another.”
The poet and novelist Qiu Xiaolong said: “In poetics, [Xie] chooses a uniquely working form, controlled language, to mold these inhuman experiences into an organic whole.”
Tracy K. Smith, a former professor of Xie’s, said: “It is a marvelous and subtle use of metaphor that does the emotional or even the spiritual work in her poems…Metaphor bears witness to the feeling that the tools and terms we have been taught to rely upon are never enough.”
Read the full article here.
Image: Todd Heisler/The New York Times.