And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight

by Lynn Xu

Overview

Part protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth, Lynn Xu's book-length poem, And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, holds fast to our fragile utopias. Under the auspice of birth and the contingency of this beginning, time opens: ecstatic, melancholy, and defiant, the voices of the poem flicker between life and death, gorgeous and gruesome, visionary and intimate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950268542
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	04/19/2022
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Born in Shanghai, China, Lynn Xu is the author of the full-length collection Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn, 2013) and the chapbooks June (Corollary Press, 2006) and Tournesol (Compline, 2021). She has performed cross-disciplinary works at the Guggenheim Museum, The Renaissance Society, Rising Tide Projects, and 300 S. Kelly Street. She teaches at Columbia University, coedits Canarium Books, and lives with her family in New York City and Marfa, Texas.

Read an Excerpt

Last night, beside the menstrual shadow of the corpse I saw my mother’s legs (her enormous legs) opening and closing in a voluptuous trance sweeping the thick current, the amorous pity of her legs which with my mouth I imitated, still pregnant, or, became, by way of imitation, innumerable, in the meantime, her foot, her toe, which refused to dissolve, and which I could see still climbing the transparency of birth, her foot in the piedras continuing to suckle, to insist, thickness, aie-aie-aie, who is this still mothering with the rags of a mouth, coughing and defecating in the middle of life and continuing to urinate, in the occultation of the middle 

snow, and the grave diggers having gone, drifted north in gusts, phalanges, nourished by numbers and the supernumerary resemblance of the turnstile, here, it is nighttime in both directions, and in these human temples, I attend, I dream, and I carry my grave clothes under my arms, mother, 

with the cadavers entering childhood still trembling like sunflowers, 

I dream, 

and flushed with humanity I approached my mouth, with the vanity of the dead, and dressed like a woman, in the path of the coffins, foot in the piedras, living, as it were, no more poorly than any other, with no more blood, sperm, tears, saliva, 

fungibility of the mouth, 

snow, 

dripping from mother, from the window, observing the snowdrift, 

and her legs (her enormous legs) opening and closing in the thick current, which I, with my mouth, imitated, in the meantime, 

the corpse’s one bare foot, without pedestal, without protection, in the ruined street,