Contemporary Authors

• Nowhere to Arrive: Poems Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 2017
• Eye Level: Poems Graywolf Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2018

1. Eye level : poems LCCN 2017938013 Type of material Book Personal name Xie, Jenny. Main title Eye level : poems / Jenny Xie. Published/Produced Minneapolis, MN : Graywolf Press, 2018. Projected pub date 1804 Description pages cm ISBN 9781555978020 (alk. paper) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Nowhere to arrive : poems LCCN 2016044877 Type of material Book Personal name Xie, Jenny, author. Main title Nowhere to arrive : poems / Jenny Xie. Published/Produced Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2017. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9780810135086 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3624.I4 .N69 2017 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Amazon -

  Jenny Xie has published poems in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The New Republic, Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

• Poetry Foundation website - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jenny-xie

  Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, forthcoming April 2018), selected by Juan Felipe Herrera as the winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017), recipient of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Prize. Her poems appear in Poetry magazine, the American Poetry Review, the New Republic, Tin House, and elsewhere. She earned degrees from Princeton University and New York University's Creative Writing Program, and has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Poets & Writers. She teaches at New York University.

• BOMB - https://bombmagazine.org/articles/jenny-xie/

  The Self Is a Fiction: Jenny Xie Interviewed by Mariam Rahmani
  The poet on the politics of the gaze, the migratory act of reading, the anxiety of bilingualism, and the universality of shame.

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  Apr 12, 2018
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  S. D. Chrostowska & Kate Zambreno

  I first met Jenny over a decade ago, when we were both students at Princeton, sweating through a summer of teaching English in China’s Hunan Province. Years later, we met in New York and formed a group with other female friends from college who worked in the humanities, tapping one another’s minds as freely as we sipped each other’s cocktails. Jenny was always reluctant to boast of her then already quickly accumulating successes. Encountering her work for the first time on the stands of my neighborhood bookstore in Brooklyn, I was immediately taken with her writing: the images were stark yet elusive, the lines intimate and yet evocative of so much outside or beyond; the poems seemed so delicately wrought I wondered whether they might shatter right there in my palms. Below, Jenny and I dive into her debut book, Eye Level (Graywolf Press), winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. “Clarity is just questioning having eaten its fill,” reads the end of her poem “To Be a Good Buddhist is Ensnarement.” Which is to say: before you know it, you’re hungry with more questions.

  Mariam Rahmani I want to start with the title, and the recurring figure of the eye. As much as readers expect metawriting and words about what it means to deal in words, the salient metaphor in this collection seems to be the act of seeing. The “I” in the poems—and I hesitate to collapse that I/eye with you, the author—is an observer. Does that make writing an act of observing?
  Jenny Xie Much of the collection is about linking the “eye” with an “I”, and thinking through the entanglements of gazes and visual encounters with power, selfhood, and presence. The speaker in these poems, especially those from the first section of the book, engages in the act of observation and renders certain aspects of seeing into language, but observing is never a passive absorption of visual stimuli. The eye amplifies and tames; it heightens and erases.
  MR Are the poems “about” you, still, today, now that they’re packaged and clean and in this gorgeous book, or do they take on a life of their own when they’re on the page?
  JX My initial impulse is to say that the poems aren’t “about” me, but that response plays into the faulty assumption that poems whose primary aim might be self-disclosure or testimony are somehow less aesthetically rigorous or energizing. I don’t buy that, really. At the same time, the “I” in these poems, while they might share autobiographical details with the person that wrote them, aren’t “about” me insofar as the speakers are fashioned, dramatized, contextually bound. I invoke them and write into them to better serve the poems and their modes, registers, and textures. Many of the poems take up self-interrogation, but I’m not interested in getting the plot details exactly right. The self is a fiction.
  The poems in the first and third sections of the book are precisely about the provisional nature of selfhood, how it gets generated and regenerated depending on context. When I’m writing, I’m often interested in stripping away the selves that feel artificial—that I can easily inhabit when I’m moving through the world—to turn inward toward the interior flux. In that sense, the poems are often closer to “me” than the “me.” Perhaps that’s a slippery answer, but the question is also slippery, in a good way.
  MR You once told me that your writing process involves reading for hours before sitting down to compose. I was struck by the poetry of this image, the romance of coupling with other people’s words before you can produce your own. How do you prevent a sort of unwilled pastiche?
  JX I find that when I sit down to compose, my mind needs ample time to loosen and to unlatch from more linear, familiar lines of thinking. One way to get myself to a more wild, elastic mental space is to read before I compose. It’s always not “reading” in the sense of plowing through a book, or surrendering to the absorption of narrative; it’s more like dipping in and out of different texts, as a way to spur disorientation. I get bored when I draw close to something I’ve written or created recently, so infecting myself with other lines (or films, music, artwork) is a way of working toward self-forgetfulness. I don’t necessarily fear other voices, because my own “voice,” if I have one, is constructed and reinforced from a lifetime of reading and listening. I’m most energized when I don’t quite sound like myself, because that’s when I get curious about what or whom I’m inhabiting, and what can be wielded with a different voice or mode of speaking.

  MR You move us from twentieth-century Russia to fifteenth-century Japan, from Tsvetaeva to Ikkyū. There’s a lot about geographic travel here, or rather, tourism; how does that interact with the travel of the mind, and reading as a sort of travel?
  JX Reading is migratory, an act of transport, from one life to another, one mind to another. Just like geographic travel, reading involves estrangement that comes with the process of dislocating from a familiar context. I gather energy from this kind of movement, this estranging and unsettling, and I welcome it precisely because it’s conducive to examination, interrogation, reordering. Travel, imaginative or physical, can sharpen perception and force a measuring of distance and difference.
  MR But is it travel or tourism? The latter seems more incriminating. I’m thinking, of course, about the rise of modern tourism as a practice of European imperialism, linked so closely to the advent of photography; you also deal in snapshots, in a way, such as in the Phnom Penh diptych, but more frequently to expose their dark underbellies.
  JX You’re absolutely right that the latter is more incriminating, though I think most kinds of travel involve negotiating ethical encounters. There’s nothing easy, or easeful, about it. Much of it has to do with the privilege of mobility—of who can enter and leave, who can traverse borders and who can’t, and what is sought out in travel. There’s a lot to think through here, but I would say tourism commodifies difference and encourages a thirst for consuming it from a safe distance. There’s also a good deal of exploitative labor involved, clearly, which is often hidden from view. Taking up residence in a place doesn’t extinguish the possessive tourist drive either. In many cases, being an expat can encourage a false sense of ownership over a place—perhaps partly devised in opposition to the tourist—that can feed into a sense of cultural arrogance.
  The Phnom Penh diptych sequence that begins the book doesn’t aim to be polemical, though. I was interested in moral complication rather than moralizing. There, I’m attempting to lay bare some of the tensions inherent in being a foreigner, an expatriate, a tourist, an outsider.
  MR Your work really captures the anxiety of bilingualism and how it can leave one feeling estranged from both tongues. Is that how you relate to English and Mandarin?
  JX I immigrated to the U.S. from China at age four, and Mandarin was my first language. I spoke it at home, and around family friends, who were exclusively recent Chinese immigrants. I began to learn English when I entered grade school, in classes designated for ESL learners. Similar to many immigrant children, I internalized the hierarchy that placed English first, and felt the accompanying shame of being marked a non-native English speaker. Speaking and writing in English carried with it the anxiety of being betrayed by one’s usage mistakes and lack of fluency; this was no doubt reinforced by the linking of academic success to facility with speech and writing. At the same time that I began learning English, my Mandarin slowed in development, because I wasn’t using it outside of the domestic sphere. To this day, even though I enrolled in a year of intensive Mandarin study in college, my Mandarin is quite stunted. I’ve lost most of the ability to read and write in it, sadly.
  You’re right that the poems carry an “estrangement from both tongues,” a sense of not feeling completely settled in either English or Mandarin. At the same time, language is a kind of estrangement in this book. Silence is fertile and full, and language—used conventionally—can feel like a reduction, a narrowing, of what is ample and in flux.
  MR The “I” here seems unabashedly feminine, not just in the use of the pronoun “she” in moments of mirroring/seeing but also in the way the gaze itself, observant yet not proprietary, acute yet not cutting (or more precisely, only cutting when directed inward), seems like a feminine gaze—or better, a femininist gaze, as in the opposite of a masculinist vision. That’s not a word, femininist, but I like how it recalls feminist while taking a side step. Are the poems feminist, feminine, maybe even—and now I’m asking you to humor me—femininist?
  JX Femininist—yes! I think gender is certainly one category of otherness that infuses the poems in the book, though perhaps not the principal one—at least not consciously so. If the “femininist” gaze is one that is slant and destabilizing, and working against certain kinds of centralizing power, I hope these poems exhibit it. Then again, in “Zuihitzu,” “Visual Orders,” and elsewhere, the speaker occasionally implies the desire to look without being seen, which can be read as a voyeuristic looking that gets coded as “masculine,” though the poems are trying to slip out of that.
  MR It can be masculine—but couldn’t one also say that looking without being seen is the plight of many women, even if not their desire?
  JX That’s certainly true. I do think a key difference, however, lies in electing not to be seen, of choosing to take refuge from exposure. Really, I’m interested in how many forms of sight can be oppressive. The rapaciousness of vision, which becomes a manner of conquering the visible world and exhausting it.
  MR I have been refraining from quoting your lines back to this whole time—they’re breathtaking and they haunt me—but now that the dam’s been broken: “the borderless empire of the interior.” It seems to me that anyone who writes lives there, takes refuge there, in that infinite landless land you call “the empire of the interior.” This is a crazy huge question, but what is the interior? How do we live there, ethically, without abandoning the exterior, or what you call “the outer world”?
  JX The dam has been broken from my end, as well. “The infinite landless land”—that’s a good place to start, isn’t it? I’m haunted by that line of yours. In some poems in the book, the interior is equated with the mind, that vast and fluid terrain. I think earlier I referred to it as the internal flux. So much of everyday living involves performance, exposure, and projecting a solidity of self. One way to go about defining the interior is to mark it as the obverse of the public. The interior, cast in that way, is the realm of the private, the inviolable and inalienable. But the concept of interiority is also culturally determined. Poems such as “Rootless,” “Long Nights” and “Borderless” seek to dismantle the false binary of interior/exterior, and of the interior as some sort of gated enclosure. The Buddhist perspective sees the separate self—which oftentimes gets linked to interiority—as illusory. I believe that, too. The mind loves to find ways to draw up barriers that aren’t really there.
  MR As someone training in literary scholarship, I always think of the concern with interiority as quintessentially modern. Are these poems modern? Postmodern? And because I’m risking a yawn here, I’ll clarify that this is a political question for me: there’s still so much work to be done in decentering Europe from the plane(s) of modernism, and it strikes me that these poems do some of that work.
  JX The poems are definitely invested in states of interiority and kinds of subjectivity, and that inward turn feels, as you say, modern. On the other hand, I hope that the poems don’t feel too narrowly inward, to the point of solipsism. My intention in the book was also to interrogate the stability and authority of the narrating self and to cast an eye on its construction, which would be a postmodern preoccupation. What marks a postmodern poem, though? The evacuation or undermining of a traditional lyric “I”? It’s worth considering who has never had a claim to the authority of a lyric I to begin with. Xiaojing Zhou thinks through this in her book The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian-American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2006), and argues for reconceptualizing the lyric subject as “a site where established notions of the Cartesian I are contested, transformed, and reinvented” by poets of color and writers who inhabit categories of otherness.
  MR I was surprised to find the red of shame riddling poems like “Borderless” and “Zazen”. It reminded me of my childhood, and the parts of myself still shaded by that childhood. I shy away from writing about shame because it walks so dangerously close to Orientalism. And yet, for a woman with my upbringing, shame is real. What do you make of all these entanglements?
  JX I’m very interested how you speak of shame and its Orientalist leaning—I hadn’t considered that argument, and I want to read about it and sit with it further… For now, I’ll ask: What is shame? Is it the misalignment between who we think ourselves as and what has been exposed of us? Is it how’re we’re being read, and how we read ourselves, against our internal codes of conduct? I recently picked up Gillian White’s excellent Lyric Shame (Harvard University Press, 2014), which underscores, at one point, how shame indicates an awareness of others’ minds, and how we take up residence there. What’s fascinating, too, is the implied shame of expressing shame—perhaps the vulnerability of laying it bare. Certainly shame and vision are intertwined—shame seems to spring from being fixed in another’s gaze or one’s own, and glimpsing a self that chafes against idealized self-evaluation. Being visible, the object in someone’s field of sight, carries with it the risk of scrutiny and reduction. In that sense, so much of existing as a social being can involve shame. Being seen or understood is shameful, precisely because it is so limiting. It feels false to be calcified by another’s presumed understanding. To add another complication, there’s also the shame of being betrayed by need; the shame of being dependent on others who will never know us fully.
  MR If I’m understanding you correctly, then, you’d like to gesture toward the universality of shame? Or if not universality, its operativeness in the multiple cultures at hand?
  JX Yes, the universality of shame—the shame that comes with being a visible object in the world.

  Mariam Rahmani is a writer and student based in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a novel as well as, with the support of a 2018 PEN/Heim Translation Grant, an authorized translation of Mahsa Mohebali’s Don’t Worry (Tehran: 2008) while pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Rumpus and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

• Princeton University, Lewis Center for the Arts Department website - http://arts.princeton.edu/news/2018/04/award-winning-writer-and-princeton-alumna-jenny-xie-reads-with-six-seniors-in-princetons-creative-writing-program-on-april-27/

  Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts selects Poet Jenny Xie for Holmes National Poetry Prize
  May 29, 2018

  Award-winning writer and Princeton alumna Jenny Xie, recipient of the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing. Photo by Teresa Mathew.
  Poet and Princeton alumna Jenny Xie has been selected as the latest recipient of the Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes National Poetry Prize awarded by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University.
  The Holmes National Poetry Prize was established in memory of Princeton 1951 alumnus Theodore H. Holmes and is presented each year to a poet of special merit as selected by the faculty of the Creative Writing Program, which includes writers Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Paul Muldoon, James Richardson, Tracy K. Smith, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Susan Wheeler. The award, currently carrying a prize of $5,000, was first made to Mark Doty in 2011 and has since also been awarded to Evie Shockley, Natalie Diaz, Matt Rasmussen, Eduardo Corral, and Claudia Rankine.
  “To say I’m humbled and moved to receive the Theodore H. Holmes and Bernice Holmes National Poetry Prize is a vast understatement—as would be any superlative I could offer here,” said Xie. “I’m very honored to be awarded a prize from those who did so much to shape who I am both on the page and off as a reader, a writer, and a mind. I owe an unpayable debt of gratitude to my professors in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, and to be recognized by the Holmes Prize is a great joy and deeply meaningful to me in manifold ways.”
  Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017), recipient of the Drinking Gourd Prize. She holds a B.A. from Princeton University, Class of 2008, and an M.F.A. from New York University’s Creative Writing Program, and she has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Bread Loaf, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Poets & Writers. She teaches at New York University.
  On April 27, Xie read at Princeton along with six seniors in the Creative Writing Program through a series hosted by the seniors at Labyrinth Books. The C. K. Williams Reading Series presents a public showcase for the work of the thesis students and gives the senior class the opportunity to read with and learn from established writers whom they admire. An interview with Xie, along with video from her reading, is below.
  “Jenny Xie is a poet of keen observation, quiet wisdom, and astounding lyric revelation,” notes Tracy K. Smith, Director of the Program in Creative Writing and current U.S. Poet Laureate. “It has been particularly meaningful to those of us who were once her professors to witness her mature work make its entry into the world. We feel a deep sense of pride and awe at the poet she has become.”
  To learn more about the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Program in Creative Writing, visit arts.princeton.edu.

  Award-winning Writer and Princeton Alumna Jenny Xie Reads with Six Seniors in Princeton’s Creative Writing Program on April 27
  April 20, 2018
  The C.K. Williams Reading Series is organized by Princeton students in collaboration with Labyrinth Books
  Award-winning writer and Princeton alumna Jenny Xie and six seniors in the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University will read from their work at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, April 27 at Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street. The reading is part of the C.K. Williams Reading Series, named in honor of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet who served on Princeton’s creative writing faculty for 20 years.
  The series showcases senior thesis students of Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing alongside established writers as special guests. Featuring student writers Mim Ra Aslaoui, Nicolas Freeman, Isabella Grabski, Alicia Lai, Lavinia Liang, and Rosed Serrano, the event is free and open to the public.

  Award-winning writer and Princeton alumna Jenny Xie. Photo by Teresa Mathew.
  Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017), recipient of the Drinking Gourd Prize. She holds a B.A. from Princeton University, Class of 2008, and an M.F.A. from New York University’s Creative Writing Program, and she has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Poets & Writers. She teaches at New York University.
  The five seniors, who are pursuing a certificate in creative writing in addition to their major areas of study, will read from their senior thesis projects. Each is currently working on a novel, a screenplay, translations, or a collection of poems or short stories as a part of a creative thesis for the certificate. Thesis students in the Program in Creative Writing work closely with a member of the faculty, which includes Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Paul Muldoon, Kirstin Valdez Quade, James Richardson, Tracy K. Smith, Susan Wheeler, and a number of distinguished lecturers.
  To learn more about the Program in Creative Writing, visit http://arts.princeton.edu/academics/creative-writing/

• Brooklyn Book Festival website - http://www.brooklynbookfestival.org/authors/xie-jenny/

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  Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level, recipient of both the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, and Nowhere To Arrive, recipient of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. Her poems appear in Poetry, the New Republic, Tin House, and Kenyon Review Online, among other publications. She has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, Bread Loaf, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Poets & Writers. She teaches at New York University.
  Author Website
  http://www.jennymxie.com
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• Academy of American Poets website - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/jenny-xie-0

  Jenny Xie

  Photo credit: Teresa Mathew
  Texts by this Poet:
  Restoration in the Attention Economy: On Reading C. D. Wright’s “ShallCross”
  browse all texts
  Jenny Xie was born in Hefei, China, and raised in New Jersey. She holds degrees from Princeton University and New York University’s creative writing program, and has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Poets & Writers.
  Her debut poetry collection, Eye Level, was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera as the winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award, given by the Academy of American Poets, and was published by Graywolf Press in 2018.
  About Eye Level Herrera writes:
  ‘Between Hanoi and Sapa’ this collection begins and continues with its ‘frugal mouth’ that ‘spends the only foreign words it owns.’ This knowing ‘travels’ in a spiral-shaped wisdom. We go places; we enter multiple terrains of seeing; we cross cultural borders of time, voices, locations—of consciousness. Then—we notice we are in a trembling stillness with all beings and all things. Jenny Xie’s Eye Level is a timely collection of beauty, clarity, and expansive humanity.
  Xie is the recipient of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize for Nowhere to Arrive, and her poems appear in The New Republic, Tin House, Harvard Review, The Literary Review, Narrative, and elsewhere.
  She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at New York University.

• Jenny Xie website - http://www.jennymxie.com

  Jenny Xie is the author of EYE LEVEL (Graywolf Press, 2018), recipient of both the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, and NOWHERE TO ARRIVE (Northwestern University Press, 2017), recipient of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. She holds degrees from Princeton University and New York University's Creative Writing Program, and has been supported by fellowships and grants from Kundiman, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Poets & Writers, among others. She teaches at New York University.

Eye Level

Publishers Weekly. 265.12 (Mar. 19, 2018): p49+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Eye Level
Jenny Xie. Graywolf, $16 trade paper (80p)
ISBN 978-1-55597-802-0
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. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Eye Level." Publishers Weekly, 19 Mar. 2018, p. 49+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531977319/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3eb21dd4. Accessed 28 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A531977319

Jenny Xie: Eye Level

World Literature Today. 92.4 (July-August 2018): p95.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Full Text:
Jenny Xie
Eye Level
Graywolf Press

Meditative, clear, and refreshing, Eye Level is the award-winning debut of New York-based poet Jenny Xie. Xie's aptitude for unlikely metaphors leaves everything open to swift transformation in this collection, the vivid world of her poems becoming as elastic as her own marvelous lyricism as she pries tangibly and intelligently into different ways of seeing and being.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Jenny Xie: Eye Level." World Literature Today, vol. 92, no. 4, 2018, p. 95. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543779285/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=582b2752. Accessed 28 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A543779285

"Eye Level." Publishers Weekly, 19 Mar. 2018, p. 49+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531977319/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3eb21dd4. Accessed 28 June 2018. "Jenny Xie: Eye Level." World Literature Today, vol. 92, no. 4, 2018, p. 95. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543779285/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=582b2752. Accessed 28 June 2018.

• New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/jenny-xie-writes-a-sightseers-guide-to-the-self
  Word count: 1754

  May 7, 2018 Issue
  Jenny Xie Writes a Sightseer’s Guide to the Self
  Poems in “Eye Level,” her début collection, dazzle in their local details even as they pine for global reach.

  By Dan Chiasson

  Xie captures the pain of failing as an envoy between languages and cultures.Photograph courtesy Teresa Mathew

  The title of Jenny Xie’s début poetry collection, “Eye Level” (Graywolf), is a pair of palindromes. You realize this only after you’ve gone a little nuts staring at the book’s cover, and of course the effect cannot be reproduced in speech. Two common words in a familiar English idiom wouldn’t normally attract this sort of pattern analysis: it’s not how we tend to read. But the phrase “eye level,” encountered at eye level, detains you in pleasant consideration of its intriguing, perhaps meaningless, symmetries. This is a book about the necessity of toggling between the enchantments of the page and the allure of the horizon: Xie’s “appetite for elsewhere” competes with a longing for the “infinite places within language to hide.” The poems dazzle in their local details, even as they pine for global reach and scale: “You’ll wreck your eyesight poring over pages in low light,” Xie writes, recalling one of the “Old Wives’ Tales on Which I Was Fed,” “but looking at all things green from a distance can coax it back.”
  Xie, who was born in China and raised in New Jersey, teaches at N.Y.U. “Eye Level,” published after winning the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, is a book partly about living and travelling abroad, with dispatches from Hanoi, Phnom Penh, Corfu, and other “distances” which, encountered up close, dissolve in a blur of commotion. You can travel far from home and still be stuck with yourself, as poets at least since Horace have known. Yet the basis of Xie’s work is a solitude distinct from loneliness. “When I can no longer keep dividing,” she writes, in “Solitude Study,” “the odds are in my favor to strike it out alone.” Odd numbers are not evenly divisible: the self is the remainder left over when the mind is “uncluttered with others.” Like the nifty palindrome effect of her title, this conceit is something between a game and an insight, a self-amusement that defines the isolation that gave rise to it. In “Rootless,” a sleepy train ride in Vietnam between Hanoi and Sapa is an occasion for descriptive ingenuity: “Hours ago, I crossed a motorbike with a hog strapped to its seat, / the size of a date pit from a distance.” The word “crossed” suggests some creepy genetics experiment, as though Xie’s imagination had bred motorcycles and swine. But the resulting image, a “date pit,” takes shape only when a third, objective element, “distance,” is introduced. Rootless though rooted in her seat, Xie, the only constant in a changing landscape, is chagrined to find that she is also its only standard of measurement: “Me? I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.” Though she’s the one “passing,” the towns get assigned the adjective. Xie comes across as a magician of perspective and scale, troubled by her own virtuosic illusions.
  Through Xie’s eyes, we can see the binds and paradoxes of being stuck inside a single point of view. When you’re at eye level with another person, however, you can be briefly prodded out of solipsism: you see yourself being seen. This split in consciousness requires alternating curiosity and caution, as you pass, in the instant, from being the voyeur to being the spectacle. The book’s epigraph, from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, suggests the problem: “The eye you see is not / an eye because you see it; / it is an eye because it sees you.” Xie, I sense, could go on forever playing mental solitaire, but a keen ethical imperative always kicks in, directing her imagination to consider how she is herself imagined. Such self-interrogation never occurs to her fellow-tourists, who “curate vacation stories, / days summed up in a few lines,” and who forget “how banality / accrues with no visual evidence.” But Xie, conscious that her own style likewise compresses vast swaths of experience into “a few lines,” does not exclude herself from the critique. The ironies of her shifting positions, as a Chinese immigrant in America and as a Chinese-American travelling through Asia, saturate a passage from “Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season.” Xie finds herself sweating “over plates of pork dumplings and watery beer” in a Chinese restaurant:
  Can you fix this English?
  the Chinese restaurant owner asks, pushing a menu toward me.
  The men here chew toothpicks like uncles on both sides of my family.
  They talk with their mouths full.
  I translate what little I can, it’s embarrassing.
  Just passing through?
  asks his eldest daughter, as she turns to the fan.
  The task of translation dogs Xie’s art, as well as her life. Are those bits of English dialogue reported verbatim, or translated from the owner’s and his daughter’s Chinese? “I translate what little I can, it’s embarrassing”: the shame corresponds to Xie’s predicament in the restaurant and, equally, her plight on the page. She must “fix” her poems, recorded in English but reaching for global meanings, to convey the pain of failing as an envoy between languages and cultures.
  For Xie, the disintegrations of travel can be mended—“fixed”—in her work, where scattered impressions are gathered up into formal and rhetorical wholes. Xie’s diary-like sequences cut from scene to scene without intervening narrative, like a map on which each city “is a wrist-width away from the last.” They scramble time in an analogous fashion: “Someone once told me, before and after is just another false binary,” Xie writes, her deadpan tone suggesting that this isn’t news to her. In “Fortified,” a bit of roadside kitsch in Greece suggests her poems’ elegiac methods of mixing up arrivals and departures:
  On the bus ride back,
  we pass a store named Ni Hao, selling pelts.
  Hello in all directions.
  The poet travelling to new places carries inside her a memory of old ones, and, even deeper down, vestiges of childhood, like those “uncles” who suddenly come to mind in the Chinese restaurant. Xie spoke Mandarin at home and learned English in school; that banal “Hello” sign, aimed at the Chinese tourist, stands in for the inextricable weave of greeting and parting that makes up Xie’s emotional landscape. It also stands, I think, for something essential about poems, which exist, as John Ashbery said, in “a recurring wave of arrival.” The vivid family ghosts conjured in poems like “Lineage,” where Xie’s mother works “a steamed pot of land,” or “Metamorphosis,” when she “trades the pad of a stethoscope for a dining room spatula,” have disappeared in life but can still take shape—and feel new—on the page.
  “The present tense gets close, but doesn’t enter me,” Xie writes—although, ever invested in paradox, she proclaims this in the present tense. In “Naturalization,” the use of the present to depict the past creates narrative immediacy. “It is 1992,” Xie writes, describing the yard sales and change purses she recalls from childhood. I felt some of the same elation I experience when, in “The Day Lady Died,” Frank O’Hara announces, “It is 1959.” It’s a magic trick Xie accomplishes with a few simple-seeming maneuvers, easy to foul up, but profound when successfully executed.
  “Eye Level,” with worldly landmarks and private discoveries, mapped routes and circuitous thoughts, suggests a kind of Fodor’s or Lonely Planet guide to inner life. Travel books often come with helpful phrases in the local tongue; Xie’s equivalent, I think, is found in the many memorable and quotable maxims that she coins in the course of these poems. From her past, a chorus of ancestral voices still echoes with old superstitions and customs: “Sleeping on your back will flatten your head’s shape”; “Eating the fat inside the crab sharpens the mind, / So too with roe extracted from steamed fish.” The tone of these maxims is borrowed for the haunting but often deliberately ambiguous adages that Xie fashions herself: “If you stay long enough, / the heat’s fingers will touch everything / and the imprint will sting.” Many pages of this book yield such mottoes—the epigraphs, I predict, of many slim volumes in the future. Some of the best are concentrated in “Visual Orders,” a proverb-poem in unnumbered sections that reads like personal scripture. A passage contemplates the inevitable “I”/“eye” pun that undergirds much of the book:
  The acquisitive, insatiable I.
  A disembodied eye cannot be confined
  to the skin and to what it holds captive.
  Inversely, to be unseen against one’s will is to be powerless.
  To be denied a reflection and to be locked out of a self.
  The language itself is levelled here—Xie’s gift for striking imagery withheld—in order to give her precepts heft and authority. Some of these “orders” are self-injunctions that inform Xie’s verbal mimesis, as though it could be governed by the principles of the visual arts:
  To draw ink-lines across the lids
  To dip into small pots of pigment
  To brush two-dozen times
  To flush with water and tame with oil
  To refrain and to spill in appropriate measure
  To drink from the soft and silvery pane
  To extract the root of the solitary so as to appear
  The writing of poetry is notoriously mystified, almost occult in its resistance to rules or step-by-step methods. If you’re a poet, the precision, discipline, and tact of painters or photographers seem enviable indeed. The entire process, by being externalized, seems repeatable, unlike the chance encounters of poets with their muses. Xie’s swallowed commands, shorn of their predicates, suggest that the rules of her art cannot be codified. Xie knows the truth of what Wallace Stevens said about the power of poems: supplementing the manifest world with innuendo and nuance, supplying sound to spectacle, they make “the visible / a little hard to see.” What happens at eye level gets its start in the depths. ♦

• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/22533-jenny-xie-eye-level#.WzSvUvZuL4g
  Word count: 344

  Web Exclusive – April 03, 2018
  Eye Level
  Forms of viewing
  BookPage review by August Smith

  Jenny Xie’s debut book of poetry, Eye Level, aims its gaze at two concepts: time and interiority. To arrive there, her poems travel through cities, landscapes and memories, exploring them with a voice both isolated from the world and communing with it. The result is a stunning collection—part travel narrative, part kaleidoscopic autobiography.
  The winner of the Walt Whitman Award, Eye Level works in contradictions: It speaks from solitude yet dwells in an array of communities; it ties itself to concrete places but has deeper psychological concerns. “Can this solitude be rootless, unhooked from the ground?” the speaker asks in the opening poem. “No matter. The mind exists both inside and out.” Eye Level mediates that dynamic. Things are felt in both senses of the word.
  Xie’s imagery is like an Etch A Sketch being shaken and redrawn, moving rapidly through gritty scenes in miniature. We encounter “Karaoke bars bracketed by vendors hawking salted crickets” and a “motorbike with a hog strapped to its seat, / the size of a date pit from the distance.” The speaker speaks of their “coarse immigrant blood,” their “fishbone days” and “fatty grief.” The month of a May is a “slow peach.”
  These tactile moments pull us through Xie’s relentless probing of location, both in time and space. Time has a physicality throughout (“I pull apart the evening with a fork”) and is intertwined with familial history, a realm where “suffering has its own logic.”
  Xie’s lively formal approach incorporates many styles; most notable is her series of haibun, a combination of prose poetry and haiku (a form pioneered by Matsuo Bashō, another poet who traveled the outer world while exploring the inner one). That’s what makes Eye Level such an enchanting read: its ability to be everywhere and do everything at once. It draws its energy from all over and then finds its way directly to the heart.

• Michigan Quarterly Review
  http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2018/04/cracking-the-lens-a-review-of-jenny-xies-eye-level/
  Word count: 699

  Cracking the Lens: A Review of Jenny Xie’s “Eye Level”

  by Augusta Funk
  Apr 08, 2018
  in Book Review

  Jenny Xie’s debut collection of poems, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), is an exquisite interrogation of perspective and selfhood but also reaches out to something more elusive — the troubled way language can isolate and put up borders. Casting her gaze near and far, it’s the way Xie records minutiae that breaks down these walls, actively inviting us to partake in her witnessing. “Rootless” but for her eyes, the poet often ducks below a visual register in order to teach us her art. As she explains in “Square Cells”: “screens plant bulbs / of tension inward, but hit no nerves.”
  While there is ample white space throughout the book, don’t allow that to fool you: Xie’s frame widens and welcomes Keatsian negative capability, or perhaps more so, Fanny Howe’s bewilderment, just as much as she burrows into specificity. In “Solitude Study,” in two of the book’s most gorgeous lines, Xie’s hope in her readers is unflinching: “I know we can hold more in us than we do / because the body is without core.”
  Compression can be a radical point of view, a necessity of wandering and solitude. On the other hand, it risks reaching no one. Xie maneuvers her language with a fine-tooth comb, often beginning where many poets in our cluttered, digital age, conclude: deep inside a fully-fleshed thought or image. Take the lines, “The face of Chinatown returns its color / plucked from July’s industrial steamer.” But how did we get here? And why? Later in the poem we learn exactly where we are, witness to New York’s Chinatown. And later in the collection, we step into a photograph of the poet’s childhood in Hefei, China. Expanding into scenes of everyday life, Xie’s compressive language breaks open with humility. Still, when Xie does choses opacity over clarity, her language shifts and swells like organic moods. Some of the book’s most astonishing lines are prose, perhaps a nod to the “mutable form” behind her poetic impulse. “You plant an alphabet in your sleep and wake to acres and acres of radios. Something long shuttered cracked,” she claims in “Bildungsroman.” When she sheds both the “I” and the “eye”, the register of the poet’s “selves” unspools just as skillfully in sound as it does in sight.
  Muting the visual, it seems, becomes a way of rupturing language’s glossy surface — especially when that language is tethered to a world of assimilation and patriarchal gazing. “To be seen against one’s will is to be powerless. / To be denied a reflection and to be locked out of a self,” she writes in “Inwardly”. If there’s an expectation for interiority in poetry, often the processes by which marginalized writers make this interiority isn’t given space.

  Photo of Jenny Xie via poetshouse.org
  The isolation of being a first-generation American of Chinese immigrants is reflected in moments where Xie finds herself contradicting a “constructed” self. Like the speaker in “Rootless”, who says “Me? I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.” Juan Felipe Herrera called Eye Level a collection of “expansive humanity”, and that humanity is ultimately what shines through. Xie’s ability to invite us along, witness to both beauty and mystery, is astonishing. At times she keeps her distance, but rightfully so. After all, we’re inside her world because she has invited us, not because, as a poet, it’s required.
  As the collection concludes, sparser poems offer stunning images framed in stillness, circling back to the question of perspective. This image from “Long Nights” seems to leave it as a question: “Water striders on a pond’s surface, / light as calipers: / long sentences for which there are no words.” How delightful it is, sometimes, to be satisfied by stillness alone. Because even after so many words, Xie reminds us there’s always another sentence our minds can write, always another moment of bewilderment heading our way.

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