Eye Level

March 19, 2018
Xie, winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award, strives to develop a poetics of observation in her debut, subtly reworking the documentary impulse familiar in much contemporary writing to create an alternative way to interrogate the experience of cultural otherness, outside the fraught framework of the lyric. The work exhibits much promise conceptually and is rife with feelings of loneliness, disorientation, desire, and complicity. For example, in her “Phnom Penh Diptych,” Xie writes, “There’s new money lapping at these streets./ Thirsts planted beneath the shells of high-rises.” As the sequence unfolds, images accumulate and “the corners of the city begin to peel.” Yet, rather than build tension and a sense of urgency, the observations continue to multiply as the speaker disappears among the work’s shifting perspectives. The poems that take the greatest formal risks hold the highest stakes for both reader and speaker. Xie writes in “Captivity” that “I’d forgotten all about humiliation. And yet another month fattened, tightening at the seams.” Though this piece also revolves around an interior drama, its prose form lends a much-needed sense of tension as the speaker’s surroundings become part of her emotional topography. Amid Xie’s sublime language and keen observations, “Disorder begins to flare” and some readers may wish for a deeper sense of immediacy.

March 15, 2018

Consisting of prose poems, sonnet variations, and haiku alternates, Xie's debut poetry collection (winner of the Walt Whitman Award) focuses on humankind's utter solitude. In the poems, a narrator--Xie herself--returns to Phnom Penh, where she was born, and tries but fails to connect with the inhabitants and their customs. In other sections, the poet reminisces about her family and years growing up in New Jersey while still feeling alone. Some of the pieces become lost in their own surrealistic twists, as in "Long Nights," reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's "Wild Nights, Wild Nights" but without the passion. Overall, the poems resemble segments from a dream in which one's emotional state remains after awakening. As Xie puts in "Bildungsroman," one of a group of prose poems, "You plant an alphabet in your sleep and wake to acres and acres of radios," suggesting the relationship between sleeping (or the interior life) and waking explored throughout the collection. VERDICT Ultimately, these language poems are oblique and mysterious. Their metaphysical content is barely tangible, and some therefore run out of steam, but others take off. Recommended for academic libraries.--C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

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