Past

The poems in Wendy Xu's third collection, The Past, fantasize uneasily about becoming a palatable lyric record of their namesake, while ultimately working to disrupt this Westernized desire. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, Wendy Xu immigrated to the United States in 1989, three days ahead of the events of Tian'anmen Square. The Past probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, and immigration as an ongoing psychic experience without end. Moving spontaneously between lyric, fragment, prose, and subversions in "e;traditional"e; Chinese forms, the book culminates in a centerpiece series of "e;Tian'anmen Square sonnets"e; (and their subsequent erasures), to conjure up the irrepressible past, and ultimately imagine a new kind of poem: at once code and confession. "e;Tian'anmen Sonnet"e; (dead air in air... )Dead air in airThe anniversary of languageholds you back againstbucolic dreaming, down streamfrom here is runninga miraculous color, elegybursts like a ribbon in airThinking again of the Square todayBold sky, passing episodes of cloudVegetation mutters in the Far WestA column of ghostsgoing violet over timeFamiliar song looping overheadLines pressed in air