The Rupture Tense

Starred review from July 18, 2022
The restless, luminous second book from Xie (Eye Level) weaves a web of family and ancestral history, aesthetics, and intergenerational trauma. Xie begins with a cycle of poems addressing the work of photographer Li Zhensheng, which depict the atrocities of Mao’s regime and create an atmosphere of dread that permeates the collection: “The disappeared./ The executed, slender backs to the firing squad./ How close Li had to stand to acquire their expressions, close/ enough he could smell the spume of blood and of brain matter.” Poems weave back and forth in time as she visits relatives in China in the present. The final cycle of poems is an elegy for the poet’s grandmother that evokes the ways that an absence can be omnipresent: “Nowhere am I rubbing a filament of 1958 against 2020// Nowhere is there a visual shock, two years sparking an omitted detail// Somewhere a generation of faces melts onto the last generation’s// Somewhere we keep attaching to the boundless unknowable.” Xie’s detached and precise language in the earlier poems echoes the oppressive climate of the Revolution and makes the more emotionally charged poems hit harder. This is a devastating master class in subtlety.

Starred review from October 28, 2022

Xie follows the National Book Award finalist Eye Level with a remarkable collection that uses the photography of Li Zhensheng to examine the awful excesses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the arduous process of absorbing memory in general. As Xie deftly describes him, Li was "a government-backed photojournalist...[who] made his own theater in cellulose nitrate.... For every propagandist photograph he published, he earned eight frames of film. The photographs that would never get approved." The 30,000 negatives he hid under his floorboards were finally developed four decades after he took them, and they show us "The brutalized. The hanged. The stoned. The lashed. The suicides. The betrayed. The paranoid. The disappeared. The executed" and elsewhere "eight stripped trees matching eight individuals on their knees." In her sharply observed lines, where "memory-images spill over an unarticulated margin," Xie literally demands that we look at these prints as she does, fiercely and courageously, communicating shattering truths as she reveals the "friction from the future [that] lies in the folds." As she writes, Xie further elucidates the very act of taking pictures and the ultimate unknowability of what is past, even as she plunges into memory, taking the descent past "stale tropes.... Checkpoints of [her] own making." VERDICT An elegy for Xie's grandmother points out, "Nowhere goes clean through the static of decades without hitting a nerve," and Xie hits nerves throughout in stunning and evocative language. Highly recommended.--Barbara Hoffert

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