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The Past
Elegiac and searching, poems written in the long shadow of immigration
The poems in Wendy Xu's third collection, The Past, fantasize uneasily about becoming a palatable lyric record of their namesake, while ultimately working to disrupt this Westernized desire. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, Wendy Xu immigrated to the United States in 1989, three days ahead of the events of Tian'anmen Square. The Past probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, and immigration as an ongoing psychic experience without end. Moving spontaneously between lyric, fragment, prose, and subversions in traditional Chinese forms, the book culminates in a centerpiece series of Tian'anmen Square sonnets (and their subsequent erasures), to conjure up the irrepressible past, and ultimately imagine a new kind of poem: at once code and confession.
Tian'anmen Sonnet (dead air in air ... )
Dead air in air
The anniversary of language
holds you back against
bucolic dreaming, down stream
from here is running
a miraculous color, elegy
bursts like a ribbon in air
Thinking again of the Square today
Bold sky, passing episodes of cloud
Vegetation mutters in the Far West
A column of ghosts
going violet over time
Familiar song looping overhead
Lines pressed in air
The poems in Wendy Xu's third collection, The Past, fantasize uneasily about becoming a palatable lyric record of their namesake, while ultimately working to disrupt this Westernized desire. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, Wendy Xu immigrated to the United States in 1989, three days ahead of the events of Tian'anmen Square. The Past probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, and immigration as an ongoing psychic experience without end. Moving spontaneously between lyric, fragment, prose, and subversions in traditional Chinese forms, the book culminates in a centerpiece series of Tian'anmen Square sonnets (and their subsequent erasures), to conjure up the irrepressible past, and ultimately imagine a new kind of poem: at once code and confession.
Tian'anmen Sonnet (dead air in air ... )
Dead air in air
The anniversary of language
holds you back against
bucolic dreaming, down stream
from here is running
a miraculous color, elegy
bursts like a ribbon in air
Thinking again of the Square today
Bold sky, passing episodes of cloud
Vegetation mutters in the Far West
A column of ghosts
going violet over time
Familiar song looping overhead
Lines pressed in air
104 pages, Paperback
First published August 10, 2021
11 people are currently reading
238 people want to read
About the author
Wendy Xu
15 books59 followersWendy Xu is a poet, editor, and professor, most recently the author of The Past (Wesleyan, 2021), and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review.
Her debut collection You Are Not Dead (2013), was named by Poets & Writers Magazine as one of the year’s Top 10 debuts. Xu was awarded the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry in 2011, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2014, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Tin House, Poetry, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, and widely elsewhere.
Born in Shandong, China, she holds an MFA from the Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She has been on creative writing faculty at the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Columbia University, New York University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Writing (Poetry) at The New School in New York City.
Her debut collection You Are Not Dead (2013), was named by Poets & Writers Magazine as one of the year’s Top 10 debuts. Xu was awarded the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry in 2011, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2014, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Tin House, Poetry, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, and widely elsewhere.
Born in Shandong, China, she holds an MFA from the Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She has been on creative writing faculty at the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Columbia University, New York University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Writing (Poetry) at The New School in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
April 17, 2025
Champagne burst from the cannon’s mouth Like touching the pearl of history
in a poem, the unnatural shell
nonetheless does its duties to form
Goodbye to cow country,
the green peaches kissed
by immortal blush
Not life but deathlessness Stones in a river
the mind’s most urgent
refrain: I am not always dissatisfied
of a censor waking to its never-ending work —
Ragged length of shadow whispering softly to itself
Goodbye to cow country,
the green peaches kissed
by immortal blush
Not life but deathlessness Stones in a river
the mind’s most urgent
refrain: I am not always dissatisfied
of a censor waking to its never-ending work —
Ragged length of shadow whispering softly to itself
August 19, 2021
'Your historical loveliness knows no bounds
Who is Tank Man to you?
My what if and my thank god
Tank Man torn apart by my would-be friends
Tank man dancing immortal as GIF
Tank Man as where you stop reading
Tank Man has been around the world but not back
Tank Man as nobody you care to know
I left and I admit I did not turn around, how could I, I was still shitting in my diaper
Every June I look around and you are ordering Tank Man, I am reunited with him on your plate
The day passes over you with grease on its wings'
(from 'A Sound Not Unlike a Bell', pp 10-11)
Who is Tank Man to you?
My what if and my thank god
Tank Man torn apart by my would-be friends
Tank man dancing immortal as GIF
Tank Man as where you stop reading
Tank Man has been around the world but not back
Tank Man as nobody you care to know
I left and I admit I did not turn around, how could I, I was still shitting in my diaper
Every June I look around and you are ordering Tank Man, I am reunited with him on your plate
The day passes over you with grease on its wings'
(from 'A Sound Not Unlike a Bell', pp 10-11)
March 13, 2023
Very beautiful! Interesting narrative of the life of an immigrant but told in a fascinating way. It is beautiful and heart-breaking all at once.
January 9, 2022
I found Xu's poetry to be elegant, above all else. Her use of language is evocative, and even her experimental pieces are redolent with beautiful language and speak to the human experience, and particularly the Asian-American experience. Each piece is carefully crafted. The poems work well together as a collection, and take the reader on a journey that circles back to its beginnings towards the end of the book. This collection of poetry is sharp, witty, and just a touch experimental - but the experiment is a successful one.
January 15, 2023
legend
January 4, 2022
Things that this book does that I find really cool:
- toys with one's inability (personal and abstracted) to / the impossibility of find(ing) and believing in a settled narrative that isn't seeing *from* (but then also questioning what it means to see *from* anywhere if *from* is not a settled place / the see-er is not a settled person
- the constant turning + refusal to settle on a single direction or directional thought in general
- the impossibility of language as abstraction (but also the need for it -- not just in a personal sense but yes in a personal/emotional sense, and also in a political one)
- the convolutions & contradictions of what you want at any given point in time
- the way in which English is made to fit Chinese poetic form and vice versa (sonnets for Chinese?) and the intentional artificiality/impossibility thereof
- fuck the academy, we say from within the academy (fuck)
- the past as living, a world we need, a world that's ours, and yet somehow entirely separate from ours, one not beholden to us and our problems, one we warp into unrecognizable forms and try and fail and try and fail to understand
- the reality of the situation: people have died/are dying far away from these poems, but these poems are not somehow separate (and yet somehow are) -- the impossibility of a poem having place(s) in / changing the world just in its existence // the political reality of a poem
- the mapping/segmenting/crossings of space (military, political, surveillance, but also as landscape)
- these poems as solid moments: fragmentary in the jagged way of being/feeling lost, but also somehow whole
- overall: refusal to be defined but also refusal to define, going in circles, tracing a path--
- toys with one's inability (personal and abstracted) to / the impossibility of find(ing) and believing in a settled narrative that isn't seeing *from* (but then also questioning what it means to see *from* anywhere if *from* is not a settled place / the see-er is not a settled person
- the constant turning + refusal to settle on a single direction or directional thought in general
- the impossibility of language as abstraction (but also the need for it -- not just in a personal sense but yes in a personal/emotional sense, and also in a political one)
- the convolutions & contradictions of what you want at any given point in time
- the way in which English is made to fit Chinese poetic form and vice versa (sonnets for Chinese?) and the intentional artificiality/impossibility thereof
- fuck the academy, we say from within the academy (fuck)
- the past as living, a world we need, a world that's ours, and yet somehow entirely separate from ours, one not beholden to us and our problems, one we warp into unrecognizable forms and try and fail and try and fail to understand
- the reality of the situation: people have died/are dying far away from these poems, but these poems are not somehow separate (and yet somehow are) -- the impossibility of a poem having place(s) in / changing the world just in its existence // the political reality of a poem
- the mapping/segmenting/crossings of space (military, political, surveillance, but also as landscape)
- these poems as solid moments: fragmentary in the jagged way of being/feeling lost, but also somehow whole
- overall: refusal to be defined but also refusal to define, going in circles, tracing a path--
June 5, 2023
a condition of light pours
from a loss in the door. a beetle roams the page
at night, it crosses the inky folds of time. i hear
ancient speech. roses laid down white upon the sentence.
a posture.
*
my works contained no genius, only agitated ideas
white ones, sand ones, some almost blue
by day i moved easily enough through the offices of disappointing money
uninterrupted, nobody stopped to ask for any music.
*
but i wrote to you against
all odds money paperwork love’s heavy
open door. critique. indignity. vision and often
enough time.
*
a blue parakeet singing
from the neighbor’s
gridded roof (escaped
from a cage at market)
human words move me
towards confession
(memory a slim
blade slipping
the apple)
*
the scenes whizzing by, threaten to coalesce
i’m prone to granular thought but accept their sincerity:
i longed for it, the afternoon boldly flickered first white
then ripening pale yellow, blush, the speech of a pear in technicolor.
*
down stream
from here is running
a miraculous color
*
champagne burst from the cannon’s mouth
like touching the pearl of history
in a poem, the unnatural shell
nonetheless does its duties to form
the parade of emperors
in sashes appeared just
at blue black dusk:
watched another year explode.
*
the twinkle in my eye was beginning to hurt again.
*
we eat exchanging soft permission to touch the future, mysterious diurnal flower of existence, its irresistible center. i sing happy birthday.
from a loss in the door. a beetle roams the page
at night, it crosses the inky folds of time. i hear
ancient speech. roses laid down white upon the sentence.
a posture.
*
my works contained no genius, only agitated ideas
white ones, sand ones, some almost blue
by day i moved easily enough through the offices of disappointing money
uninterrupted, nobody stopped to ask for any music.
*
but i wrote to you against
all odds money paperwork love’s heavy
open door. critique. indignity. vision and often
enough time.
*
a blue parakeet singing
from the neighbor’s
gridded roof (escaped
from a cage at market)
human words move me
towards confession
(memory a slim
blade slipping
the apple)
*
the scenes whizzing by, threaten to coalesce
i’m prone to granular thought but accept their sincerity:
i longed for it, the afternoon boldly flickered first white
then ripening pale yellow, blush, the speech of a pear in technicolor.
*
down stream
from here is running
a miraculous color
*
champagne burst from the cannon’s mouth
like touching the pearl of history
in a poem, the unnatural shell
nonetheless does its duties to form
the parade of emperors
in sashes appeared just
at blue black dusk:
watched another year explode.
*
the twinkle in my eye was beginning to hurt again.
*
we eat exchanging soft permission to touch the future, mysterious diurnal flower of existence, its irresistible center. i sing happy birthday.
September 19, 2022
It's interesting to me to think of how much 20th Century American poetry was obsessed with "the speaker" of the poem when there was just as much interest in poets evacuating the space that would consist of this speaker. Or the poem would describe a poet who feels evacuated by the moment, and then, in that absence, the presence of the world would be observed and singled out. And, as a reader, you're left in this paradoxical spot, where the poet denies their presence but is unmistakably present as she brings the world into the poem.
This is the mode in Xu's book, and I am so in favor of it, so I want to embrace it even as it refuses to let me embrace it, so happy to be in the presence of this restrained presence. And, as Xu politically defines this evacuating speaker in terms of her life as an immigrant, the complexities surrounding assimilation into this country, her life with aging parents who are also her connection with the country where she was born, what a relationship would be like with a country that she left as it swept through Tiananmen Square. I could go on. And there is such a dynamism to what should goad the poet to outrage (and which is unleashed some in the concluding poem, "Notes for an Opening"), but which, for my reading, is used to explain the complex stance the poet expresses throughout the book.
This is the mode in Xu's book, and I am so in favor of it, so I want to embrace it even as it refuses to let me embrace it, so happy to be in the presence of this restrained presence. And, as Xu politically defines this evacuating speaker in terms of her life as an immigrant, the complexities surrounding assimilation into this country, her life with aging parents who are also her connection with the country where she was born, what a relationship would be like with a country that she left as it swept through Tiananmen Square. I could go on. And there is such a dynamism to what should goad the poet to outrage (and which is unleashed some in the concluding poem, "Notes for an Opening"), but which, for my reading, is used to explain the complex stance the poet expresses throughout the book.
July 26, 2022
POEM ABOUT MY LIFE
The opening to another country was always inside
my father’s mind, in many forms, in dreams: green swords
swirling in a winter mist, colorful moths, sometimes
a molar falling out, porcelain clattering onto the table
like a single rung chime. When I come into the house I am held
by him, become a child again. The view from here seems
never to change, but in wishing it, over many years,
I have changed it. A new worry is my father’s
more delicate footsteps picking out a path to the bathroom sink
at night. The hair beneath a gardening hat leaking its color.
When the writing will not come then I must go
to the porch and listen there to the talking of one tree
to its double, and think of my father, who used to say that living
is not so painful as living would have
you believe. When as a teenager I borrowed the rusted Nissan,
drove it through a field and returned it to him with sudden
blue flowers tucked into its mouth. The bluest one
he saved. The wind that made those dull trees sing, blowing in
from the future. Somewhere my father has never been.
The opening to another country was always inside
my father’s mind, in many forms, in dreams: green swords
swirling in a winter mist, colorful moths, sometimes
a molar falling out, porcelain clattering onto the table
like a single rung chime. When I come into the house I am held
by him, become a child again. The view from here seems
never to change, but in wishing it, over many years,
I have changed it. A new worry is my father’s
more delicate footsteps picking out a path to the bathroom sink
at night. The hair beneath a gardening hat leaking its color.
When the writing will not come then I must go
to the porch and listen there to the talking of one tree
to its double, and think of my father, who used to say that living
is not so painful as living would have
you believe. When as a teenager I borrowed the rusted Nissan,
drove it through a field and returned it to him with sudden
blue flowers tucked into its mouth. The bluest one
he saved. The wind that made those dull trees sing, blowing in
from the future. Somewhere my father has never been.
Read
June 30, 2025"When something inside me sprung up new, green even/ More hostile, less wounded...What can I do, except continue to demonstrate love?/ Revision is a practice of faith/ Revision is a practice of my love against time" (2)
"Flowers carried on an invisible hand above the ocean, color peeling off of me/ Ruled by Chinese astrology, which is to say mood, I eat the mooncake to/ prepare for the new year/ My sadness supplements my vision when I write/ A factory where I reproduce myself daily, go nonverbal/ Like beach trash and unanswered questions" (12)
"The twinkle in my eye was beginning to hurt again" (74)
"I do not like crowds, mandatory participation, enclosed spaces/ Time is absolutely boring and violent" (85)
"In my adult life I throw up on public transportation" (89)
"Where you cut it, it grows there double/ Where you splice the tender shoot sprouts (in its exact location) a twinning of/ branches/ This is so beautiful and nonhuman I don't know what to say" (91)
"Flowers carried on an invisible hand above the ocean, color peeling off of me/ Ruled by Chinese astrology, which is to say mood, I eat the mooncake to/ prepare for the new year/ My sadness supplements my vision when I write/ A factory where I reproduce myself daily, go nonverbal/ Like beach trash and unanswered questions" (12)
"The twinkle in my eye was beginning to hurt again" (74)
"I do not like crowds, mandatory participation, enclosed spaces/ Time is absolutely boring and violent" (85)
"In my adult life I throw up on public transportation" (89)
"Where you cut it, it grows there double/ Where you splice the tender shoot sprouts (in its exact location) a twinning of/ branches/ This is so beautiful and nonhuman I don't know what to say" (91)
January 31, 2026
"Tip the concrete into my mouth as if I too
were a city in need of hardening."
genuinely every poem in this floored me more than the last, the entire collection cumulatively leaving me feeling like i've been holding my breath. xu utilizes language-- her version of language, her experience of language(s)-- in such an incredible way, each word artfully arranged as if a brick to a tower. loved this, already want to read again for the first time.
were a city in need of hardening."
genuinely every poem in this floored me more than the last, the entire collection cumulatively leaving me feeling like i've been holding my breath. xu utilizes language-- her version of language, her experience of language(s)-- in such an incredible way, each word artfully arranged as if a brick to a tower. loved this, already want to read again for the first time.
October 15, 2022
i do recommend
March 16, 2023
Beautiful
March 19, 2023
cant say i fully understood but i can say i liked it!
such a good cover also
such a good cover also
March 24, 2023
3.5 but that’s on me, poetry confuses me
June 14, 2024
Loved the tiananmen sonnets. Made me rethink the “you.” I have to reread this. Also reminded me I suck at reading and have to do better to give these texts justice !!!!!!!
November 25, 2024
I'm not a huge poem person but I am trying to expand my reading. I did like a couple of the poems but I have more to learn, I guess as I was having a hard time interpreting a couple.
Read
June 29, 2025This title is available as an eBook through McCain Library and can be accessed here: https://agnesscott.on.worldcat.org/oc...
April 13, 2023
Let’s write about why write like honestly not embarrassed by this question nor it’s ubiquity why write well this: doubt sprinkled with nods to the beautiful untouched moments that writing doesn’t desecrate: the ultimate glimmery writing!
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews