Phrasis

by Wendy Xu

Overview

Wendy Xu articulates the whole world by freezing it all at once, looking closely at its parts, and zeroing in on the one image or phrase or feeling that makes the day seem possibly beautiful under all the scaffolding, sirens, and other natural (analog and online) interruptions that make up daily living.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934200940
Publisher:	Fence Magazine, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/18/2017
Series:	Ottoline Prize
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Wendy Xu: Wendy Xu is the author of Phrasis (Fence, 2017), You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State UniversityPoetry Center, 2013), and several chapbooks, including Naturalism (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015). Xu is also the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Editorial Reviews

06/05/2017
In her second collection, Xu (You Are Not Dead) carefully navigates the lyric form and the affective tension of the interior/exterior dichotomy, exploring the nature of what can be felt and what can be written about. A painterly, James Schuyler–esque sensibility infuses this inward-driving work, as seen in “Some People,” in which Xu writes, “If they found/ me oblique then I am doing this for my bluer/ augmented self now.” It is a powerful statement of writerly self-affirmation amid the crowding, judging, monolingual “they” that readers encounter throughout the book. The poems are primarily composed of grammatically torqued phrases and fragments, dream notes, revels in “the abstract middle” between attachment and estrangement, and observations—the material of everyday life. For example, in “Recovery,” Xu writes, “The it of love was on my mind,” and she also recalls a war, “a syntactical/ construction pointing back toward itself.” Xu’s tendency toward abstraction is an attempt to protect (rather than obscure or erase) the personal, the sacred, and the private. In one fragment, the poet names her accumulation of poetic matter as “A catalogue then, of the present as it shifts into rose view.” To read this catalogue is to see the world transformed through Xu’s attentiveness to the possibilities of language in a surveillance-riddled landscape. (May)

Publishers Weekly