FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Juan Felipe Herrera

For years now, I've been using the wrong palette.
Each year with its itchy blue, as the bruise of solitude reaches its expiration date.

Planes and buses, guesthouse to guesthouse.

I've gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight,
my overreactive motion sickness.

9 p.m., Hanoi's Old Quarter: duck porridge and plum wine.

Voices outside the door come to a soft boil.

--from "Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season"

Jenny Xie's award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. The sensual worlds here--colors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes--bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen. As Xie writes, "Me? I'm just here in my traveler's clothes, trying on each passing town for size." Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. Xie is a poet of extraordinary perception--both to the tangible world and to "all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach."

Author: Jenny Xie
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 04/03/2018
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.40w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9781555978020


Award: 2018 National Book Awards Finalist - Poetry


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 03/15/2018 pg. 97
Publishers Weekly 03/19/2018

About the Author
Jenny Xie has published poems in Harvard Review, the Literary Review, The New Republic, Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.