Debts & Lessons

by Lynn Xu

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781890650803
Publisher:	Omnidawn Publishing, Inc.
Publication date:	04/01/2013
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

Language exists because nothing exists between those/ who express themselves,” Xu announces in the first sequence of her debut, wherein “The rustling of form is a sign of voice” and “The earth all symbol.” Here, Xu brings to mind Anne Carson and Susan Howe, especially with regard to form, and Lyn Hejinian, in her relationship to language. The first four sections, “Say You Will Die For Me,” “Our Love Is Pure,” “Earth Light,” and “Enemy of the Absolute,” are especially reminiscent of Carson’s style and voice: “Turn your ghost that/ Way such that I may mine, and with what.” “Whose attending spirit holds me thus?...Of words be beggarly, be master and native/ To the gleaming glade.” In the penultimate section “Lullabies,” Xu addresses Shelley, Mandelstam, Berryman, and others in poems that blur the voice of the poet and the addressee, or as Xu puts it, “are frank with apostrophes and with crossings.” The final section, “Debts & Lessons,” takes its title from the opening of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Here, Xu moves to more familiar territory with form, drawing on the combined weight of history and recent events in a poem of startling breadth and impressions: “And fire could find no syllable no/ Common cave to slow/ Our blindness which poetry/ Then forgave/ Returning us to our meadowed paths.” While she looks back at her forebears, Xu gives fans of contemporary experimental poetry much to love. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Debts & Lessons by Lynn Xu is a miracle of quietude; each and every poem is a bright instrument of attention somehow becoming both empathy and possession.”—Donald Revell, Harriet

From the Publisher

Drawing the title of her first book from the opening section of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Canarium Books coeditor Xu offers an intensive meditation on life's demands. Her method is fresh, startling imagery, bordering on the surreal; if "Language exists because nothing exists between those/ who express themselves," then she has done her job breathtakingly. Readers will want to see what she does next.—BH

Library Journal