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The Rupture Tense: Poems
The astounding second collection by Jenny Xie, “a magician of perspective and scale” (The New Yorker)
Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory—historical, collective, personal—stains and erodes. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged.
The Rupture Tense begins with poems provoked by the photography of Li Zhensheng, whose negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and concludes with an aching elegy for the poet’s grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end of the Revolution. This extraordinary collection records the aftershocks and long distances between those years and the present, echoing out toward the ongoing past and a trembling future.
Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory—historical, collective, personal—stains and erodes. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged.
The Rupture Tense begins with poems provoked by the photography of Li Zhensheng, whose negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and concludes with an aching elegy for the poet’s grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end of the Revolution. This extraordinary collection records the aftershocks and long distances between those years and the present, echoing out toward the ongoing past and a trembling future.
120 pages, Paperback
First published September 6, 2022
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About the author
Jenny Xie
7 books74 followersThere is more than one author with this name
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Her chapbook, Nowhere To Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017) received the Drinking Gourd Prize. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Kundiman, and New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2020, she was awarded the Vilcek Prize in Creative Promise.
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Her chapbook, Nowhere To Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017) received the Drinking Gourd Prize. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Kundiman, and New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2020, she was awarded the Vilcek Prize in Creative Promise.
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October 18, 2022
‘We, who are made and unmade
by the dark mass of the unseen.’
‘I’m drawn to acts of looking,’ says poet Jenny Xie, ‘and toward what a gaze can puncture.’ In her first collection, the Walt Whitman Award winning Eye Level: Poems, she examined ‘all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach,’ and here in her 2022 collection The Rupture Tense her gaze casts a long look over the intertwinings of past, present and future, often through a camera lens that captured the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the reverberations of it still felt in her family today. The collection begins with brilliant ekphrastic poetry of the photos from Chinese journalist Li Zhensheng, who hid negatives of his photography that captured the public demonstrations and abuses during the Cultural Revolution under the floorboards of his apartment preserving them so they can be seen today, and moves into investigations of herself returning to China after decades in the United States as well as of her grandmother who would take her own life after the Revolution. With breathtaking poetry, Xie plunges us into moments when we feel history, feeling its gaze fall upon us like a heavy weight as we gaze to the future.
Li Zhensheng
Xie’s work often examines what she believes is that sight is ‘constructed and enabled and reinforced’ by the context around it. ‘Vision and connected forms of perception map the coordinates of what we know, while simultaneously directing our attention toward what remains unseen,’ she said in a recent ’ interview. This idea takes on multiple meanings The Rupture Tense, particularly in the idea of historical events and the way our context is shaped by those who want to direct how we see it. Take the opening poem for example, Red Puncta, written about Li Zhensheng’s photography:
By negative space, by forgetting's lining. By
background: fabric where things seethe. Where
fugitive looks and tung trees scrape open loose
seams. In the far off, shame plants in earlobes
and draws color. See how the background leaks
out watery faces that haven't been rifled
through. Such as the man in the crowd of
thousands, running his tongue over the film
scarring his teeth. Such as the woman, her fatty
lids betraying her drowsing. The ones farther
off, their heads angled away, mouthing the
unrecoverable. The background is milky fog, is
solitary, is sight that is untold. Edge closer.
Friction from the future lies in the folds.
While Zhensheng’s photos captured the events of the Cultural Revolution, Xie tells us ‘a photograph is no place to keep the dead,’ and through the photos and these poems they ‘anchor’ inside the viewer/reader, a reminder of history that resonates forward. It is a reminder not to let the past repeat itself, such as in Postmemory when she warns ‘Nature reuses / plotlines / not wanting / to waste / a thing,’ but also that the past informs the present.
(photo by Li Zhensheng)
‘There are others. The brutalized. The hanged. The stoned. The lashed. The suicides. The betrayed. The paranoid. 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.’
This is a sharp collection that finds interesting ways to continuously circle back into it’s themes. Xie uses a variance of styles, such as a poem written as instructions to a game and gives close attention to the use of white space. Many poems leave large gaps between lines that remind us of how even with gaps in time everything is interconnected, past and present as we forge towards the future. These gaps are felt in her poems about returning to China, felt in the titular rupture tense between past tense and present tense where she finds it is ‘no surprise that I’m more verb than subject.’ Xie looks at the idea of identity that is rooted in a country that now feels forgeign to you, with all its past moving within you.
Meeting Places
The world clangs!
Death barks back in the furred dark.
In the recesses of newsprint
you trace the ragged line
where one country joins
with another by torturous stitches
and feel convulsions
along your midpoint.
The world stops clanging.
Death licks at its privates.
And then you turn the page.
There is a lovely reflection on heritage going on here, but also the pains of feeling removed from it. ‘How can I be trustworthy with this mouth,’ she asks of being an English speaker. Luckily for us, the readers, Xie uses it to great poetic success. Shortlisted for the National Book Award, The Rupture Tense is an outstanding collection of work that brings past, present and future alive.
5/5
‘When spring comes around, you carry the weight of spring.
When summer comes around, you carry the weight of summer.
When fall comes around, you carry the weight of fall.
When winter comes around, your pages fall open.
And you, all future tense, leak through.’
by the dark mass of the unseen.’
‘I’m drawn to acts of looking,’ says poet Jenny Xie, ‘and toward what a gaze can puncture.’ In her first collection, the Walt Whitman Award winning Eye Level: Poems, she examined ‘all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach,’ and here in her 2022 collection The Rupture Tense her gaze casts a long look over the intertwinings of past, present and future, often through a camera lens that captured the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the reverberations of it still felt in her family today. The collection begins with brilliant ekphrastic poetry of the photos from Chinese journalist Li Zhensheng, who hid negatives of his photography that captured the public demonstrations and abuses during the Cultural Revolution under the floorboards of his apartment preserving them so they can be seen today, and moves into investigations of herself returning to China after decades in the United States as well as of her grandmother who would take her own life after the Revolution. With breathtaking poetry, Xie plunges us into moments when we feel history, feeling its gaze fall upon us like a heavy weight as we gaze to the future.
Li Zhensheng
Xie’s work often examines what she believes is that sight is ‘constructed and enabled and reinforced’ by the context around it. ‘Vision and connected forms of perception map the coordinates of what we know, while simultaneously directing our attention toward what remains unseen,’ she said in a recent ’ interview. This idea takes on multiple meanings The Rupture Tense, particularly in the idea of historical events and the way our context is shaped by those who want to direct how we see it. Take the opening poem for example, Red Puncta, written about Li Zhensheng’s photography:
By negative space, by forgetting's lining. By
background: fabric where things seethe. Where
fugitive looks and tung trees scrape open loose
seams. In the far off, shame plants in earlobes
and draws color. See how the background leaks
out watery faces that haven't been rifled
through. Such as the man in the crowd of
thousands, running his tongue over the film
scarring his teeth. Such as the woman, her fatty
lids betraying her drowsing. The ones farther
off, their heads angled away, mouthing the
unrecoverable. The background is milky fog, is
solitary, is sight that is untold. Edge closer.
Friction from the future lies in the folds.
While Zhensheng’s photos captured the events of the Cultural Revolution, Xie tells us ‘a photograph is no place to keep the dead,’ and through the photos and these poems they ‘anchor’ inside the viewer/reader, a reminder of history that resonates forward. It is a reminder not to let the past repeat itself, such as in Postmemory when she warns ‘Nature reuses / plotlines / not wanting / to waste / a thing,’ but also that the past informs the present.
(photo by Li Zhensheng)
‘There are others. The brutalized. The hanged. The stoned. The lashed. The suicides. The betrayed. The paranoid. 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.’
This is a sharp collection that finds interesting ways to continuously circle back into it’s themes. Xie uses a variance of styles, such as a poem written as instructions to a game and gives close attention to the use of white space. Many poems leave large gaps between lines that remind us of how even with gaps in time everything is interconnected, past and present as we forge towards the future. These gaps are felt in her poems about returning to China, felt in the titular rupture tense between past tense and present tense where she finds it is ‘no surprise that I’m more verb than subject.’ Xie looks at the idea of identity that is rooted in a country that now feels forgeign to you, with all its past moving within you.
Meeting Places
The world clangs!
Death barks back in the furred dark.
In the recesses of newsprint
you trace the ragged line
where one country joins
with another by torturous stitches
and feel convulsions
along your midpoint.
The world stops clanging.
Death licks at its privates.
And then you turn the page.
There is a lovely reflection on heritage going on here, but also the pains of feeling removed from it. ‘How can I be trustworthy with this mouth,’ she asks of being an English speaker. Luckily for us, the readers, Xie uses it to great poetic success. Shortlisted for the National Book Award, The Rupture Tense is an outstanding collection of work that brings past, present and future alive.
5/5
‘When spring comes around, you carry the weight of spring.
When summer comes around, you carry the weight of summer.
When fall comes around, you carry the weight of fall.
When winter comes around, your pages fall open.
And you, all future tense, leak through.’
May 19, 2023
i love the small, surprising gifts that jenny xie leaves in her language. when she shifts a phrase or image fractionally, she shifts it in such a way that the object becomes completely new and startling. the beginning and end of this collection dragged for me, however. this didn’t feel like it knew itself the way eye level did. the moments i loved were infrequent, but when they cropped up, they took my breath away:
Nature reuses / plotlines / not wanting / to waste / a thing. / And so we get sewn / back into / our origins. / The deeper / textures.
October 27, 2022
i am of course sympathetic to how diaspora creates a sense of belonging in neither place, how it acts as an eater of history and language and identity, and i think there's some cool stuff here with polyphony and so on, but you can't put in the lines "Doubtless this makes // the lacunae // effervescent" and expect to get away with it
November 30, 2022
The first half had me (I basically read 50 or so pages in quick succession), because Xie's voice just felt like a fascinating mixture of intellectual and personal. Language sort of falls apart in these poems to the point that she becomes self-reflexive and identifies points where she believes metaphors actually become meaningless. The past, present, and future rupture into a representation of time that is in a state of arrested development as a result of state-repressed travesties, like the Cultural Revolution, and diasporic ennui. The second half became unreachable mumbo jumbo to me, and it felt structurally redundant. Xie becomes more and more panicked as the collection goes along. Memory fractures, language seems to be inaccessible, and so she responds with deeply abstract and frenetically anxious poems. They did not click with me. I think the title poem is probably one of my favorites here. It's a lengthy sequence about her visiting family in Anhui and depicts a deep-set sense of alienation in a surprisingly cinematic manner: she narrates it via camera movement transitions to zoom in and out of various scenes and consciousnesses. Also, I' glad she could expose me to Li Zhensheng. Such an incredible archive of photographs left behind for everyone to see.
If you enjoy ekphrasis, this is the collection for you.
If you enjoy ekphrasis, this is the collection for you.
November 19, 2022
It's been a good year for poetry, and Jenny Xie's The Rupture Tense ranks in the top tier. The thematic center concerns a Chinese-born woman raised in the United States coming to terms with her family's experience during and after the Cultural Revolution. But the lyrical core involves the slipperiness of memory and the near-impossibility of finding the proper language--negotiating the tensions between past, present, future and their psychological variations--needed to locate even a momentary resting point. The title sequence and another long poem, "Reaching Saturation," reward careful rereadings, but you can get a good sense of Xie's project in "Memory Soldier," "The Game," "Broken Proverbs," and "Distance Sickness."
December 14, 2022
“The younger generations keep few secrets. // A secret smacks of privations. // Privatization of non speech, / overexposures of phrases. // We’re learning, too. // The rate at which silence appreciates / when neglected. // Letting go is cheap. // Forgetting, the cheapest.”
– from “Reaching Saturation”
devastatingly gorgeous...I don't have the words right now, but I will be thinking about this collection for a long time
– from “Reaching Saturation”
devastatingly gorgeous...I don't have the words right now, but I will be thinking about this collection for a long time
April 11, 2023
There are too many wonderful things about this collection. Xie's language shifts and changes much like a Rupture tense. The unique syntax and poetic forms create a sense of distance and displacement that is both suffocating and exact. There are too many lines in this collection that I stopped and paused and reread, over and over. "Entire decade where the verb to want arrived posthumously." "The dead do not end, they grow denser." "A lie is a rhythm that marks truer things."
Wow.
This is a must read collection. Xie is doing something to language that is ground breaking. And the whole collection is mind-blowing and full of inspiration.
Wow.
This is a must read collection. Xie is doing something to language that is ground breaking. And the whole collection is mind-blowing and full of inspiration.
December 22, 2022
Jenny Xie's done it again folks!!!
May 31, 2023
Another shortlisted poetry collection from the 2022 National Book Awards. I’m 4/5 of the way through the shortlist and all the collections have been unique and wonderful in their own way. The Rupture Tense felt fresh and went right to the meat of things.
Read
January 12, 2023Notables 2022 #145
August 7, 2023
The use of "I distance them at Wuhu train station" instead of "I leave them"...
October 7, 2022
I really loved this collection: beautiful, bright, sad, thoughtful, inventive. I was particularly struck by the form of the stereoscope poems, and while I loved the book as a whole, the titular poem was my absolute favorite, and it can be read online here.
February 1, 2023
Entire decade where the verb to want arrived posthumously
(from “Distance Sickness”)
Tell me, what is a poem to you?
Anything that continues.
Anything can contain you.
(from “Distance Sickness”)
Does humiliation multiply, with a reverb, with every gaze that serves as a witness? The future lures with its many eyes, on which the fields of judgment may be ploughed and ploughed.
(from “Memory Soldier”)
(from “Distance Sickness”)
Tell me, what is a poem to you?
Anything that continues.
Anything can contain you.
(from “Distance Sickness”)
Does humiliation multiply, with a reverb, with every gaze that serves as a witness? The future lures with its many eyes, on which the fields of judgment may be ploughed and ploughed.
(from “Memory Soldier”)
December 20, 2022
after Eye Level, a letdown for me. read to me as typical AsAm diaspora lamentation, with well-trod themes of the impossibility of memory, alienation, and nowhereness. (ironically, themes i felt more resonance with in Eye Level, actually, without the baggage of being topical.) i sense almost a pity too in her illustrations of China and her family and herself which left a sour taste in my mouth even for poems i think i would have admired on their own. the concluding elegy to her grandmother really rang hollow to me
as a millennial Chinese American myself i feel a kind of kinship with the author’s position as heir to the “postmemory” of the Cultural Revolution – how does one begin to write about it, from this position? the melancholy of non-relation saddled with the weight of its own non-relation? the deeper sadness for me is that in such an essay/attempt to outline this estrangement, the author was not able to step outside its very bounds; in a way it is a testament to the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution in its failure to say anything really new about it
as a millennial Chinese American myself i feel a kind of kinship with the author’s position as heir to the “postmemory” of the Cultural Revolution – how does one begin to write about it, from this position? the melancholy of non-relation saddled with the weight of its own non-relation? the deeper sadness for me is that in such an essay/attempt to outline this estrangement, the author was not able to step outside its very bounds; in a way it is a testament to the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution in its failure to say anything really new about it
April 12, 2023
Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy this collection as much as I wanted to. There were similar themes in this collection and her previous one (which I loved), but I thought Eye Level tackled them better than The Rupture Tense. I think there was something about the flow and structure of this collection (and even the poems themselves) that didn’t fully come together. It was definitely the case for the last section; I admit I was lost and I couldn’t entirely figure out what she wanted to convey in tone and message.
Xie still does a wonderful job playing with language, but looking broadly, there was a lot left to be desired.
Xie still does a wonderful job playing with language, but looking broadly, there was a lot left to be desired.
December 27, 2023
More of a 2.5 for me. I started out strong and was so interested to see more of the photographs that inspired this poetry. By the end, with the style changes, I struggled to engage. Being a shorter book containing the poetry selections, I finished, but I came to not really like the book as a result. It’s a hard topic and I have been to China so I felt like my imagination and mind were more engaged comparing the descriptions and my experience—thought different—but made me feel connected. Ultimately I lost connection with the book.
March 17, 2023
3 stars
Not going to lie, this was a bit of a letdown after the brilliance of Eye Level: Poems. I appreciate that Xie was trying to do something more conceptual here but it fell flat for me and I was unable to connect with most of the poems. That said, the collection is stronger toward the first half.
Not going to lie, this was a bit of a letdown after the brilliance of Eye Level: Poems. I appreciate that Xie was trying to do something more conceptual here but it fell flat for me and I was unable to connect with most of the poems. That said, the collection is stronger toward the first half.
July 7, 2025
With every poem in this collection being something to chew on, here are a couple of my favorites:
"Broken Proverbs"
Catch a wrong accusation by its tense. Release it, and it'll chase after the smell of its owner.
In crowds, danger lies in the dormant fissures hidden in the ears.
Collective grief has no permanent address but countless vacant rooms.
Even the chaos of the revolution can't scrape nostalgia's residue off childhood.
It can take millennia to build an archive, seconds for it to turn into a gate.
When gifted a poultice, never let it expire or go to waste.
The safest form to assume is a mirror.
By the secret curdling inside, you preserve your health.
Shove a slogan down the throat enough times and it'll become an acquired taste.
A lie is a rhythm that marks truer things.
The suds of money, without fail, washes away the chorus.
Memory pulls the past out of its outlines and stuffs it back in all the wrong spaces.
Feel around for the lacerations inside the smeared laughter.
If a person lacks coherence, it's harder to measure the dignity you can extract from them.
In every still and quiet family, the past itches.
The dead do not end, they grow denser.
"The Game"
1. Forfeit the August you fell into an open manhole. Those years when people stole metal lids in the elasticity of nightfall and sold them off for grain money. Proceed forward fifty steps.
2. Abandon the two hours you spent tracing the chiseled characters on your mother's tombstone. How you drained your water bottle to loosen the inkpot. Chalky chrysanthemums you tore apart and tossed, so the vendor couldn't retrace your steps to reclaim them. Run a few hundred feet, loping through the gates of the burial ground.
3. Erase those years when the schools were shuttered across the nation. What else was there to do but chase your siblings on the factory floor where your parents shaved down wood planks? Where your mother lost a knuckle? You're ahead a dozen paces.
4. On the high-speed train from the eastern coast to the interior, the coarse skin of time sloughing off against the track. Worker, field, worker, field, field. Lighter, you're racing, slicing though thousands of miles.
5. What leaves with a person when they slide into a position vacated by the dead?
6. Oh, there's mother. Asleep in the pigsty, breathing through the mouth. The thick edges of youth on her, upon which so much attaches. Go back two hundred meters.
7. Do you recall the year when the universities reopened? Taking the gaokao, the nerve-network of Chinese youth that summer. All that coiled energy, pressurized from those lost years, without a release valve. You're slowing down.
8. And what of those translations of Western classics, ferried over from their originals in English and French, and exchanged furtively among acquaintances? So battered they came to you rent of covers and whole chapters, openings and endings. Is that you, lagging behind?
9. To gain pace, shed superstition, shed customs, shed any spiritual feeling.
10. But tell me: What is spiritual feeling?
11. A shadow curdling behind concrete.
12. And how did your mother go? That stab of her solitude. The slackness, then the tightening of muscle tissues. Is she gone? Then unfasten each stitch of her from the margin.
13. If you can efface the query, smudge away the detail of what preceded her death, you'll slip effortlessly past this bend in time.
14. Are you not guilty? Does your silence not hold something pungent behind it? What's that steam running through your sentences?
15. To recall too much reveals you have an abundance to hide. To remember too little means you're surely lying. Retrieve the city along the river where the building's shadows have become strange. The one that houses a frugal green rail station, where someone you once knew exchanged bills for a one-way ticket.
16. There were faces from those years wilder than anything the eye could imagine on its own, some bright red.
17. You're stalled.
18. So you understand this is a game, yes? That the rules of the game allow for order, and order allows for perfection?
19. The future is charitable, makes countless offers. A sickle lopping paper, the spokes of questions. To refuse memory is modern, see?
20. The severance happens with a paring knife, slowly, then all at once.
21. What stays in you is a sanctioned secret. What ends in you ends.
22. In time, you'll grow into a silence so clean, it'll feel like being emptied.
23. Run ahead, run ahead.
The Rupture Tense helped me understand my family, in stories I may never hear from them. Jenny Xie writes "Letting go is cheap. Forgetting, the cheapest." But pulling out the past through memory is a hard earned jewel; faceted, dirt-smeared, and rougher still to replace. Impossible (and undesirable) to stuff back into its rocky linings.
Her collection of ruptures and tenses reminded me of these lines from a (more romantic) Robert Hass poem: "When the memory of that time came... it was touched by strangeness because it formed no pattern with the other events in her life. It lay in her memory like one piece of coming up from the beach with a bucket full of something..."
"Broken Proverbs"
Catch a wrong accusation by its tense. Release it, and it'll chase after the smell of its owner.
In crowds, danger lies in the dormant fissures hidden in the ears.
Collective grief has no permanent address but countless vacant rooms.
Even the chaos of the revolution can't scrape nostalgia's residue off childhood.
It can take millennia to build an archive, seconds for it to turn into a gate.
When gifted a poultice, never let it expire or go to waste.
The safest form to assume is a mirror.
By the secret curdling inside, you preserve your health.
Shove a slogan down the throat enough times and it'll become an acquired taste.
A lie is a rhythm that marks truer things.
The suds of money, without fail, washes away the chorus.
Memory pulls the past out of its outlines and stuffs it back in all the wrong spaces.
Feel around for the lacerations inside the smeared laughter.
If a person lacks coherence, it's harder to measure the dignity you can extract from them.
In every still and quiet family, the past itches.
The dead do not end, they grow denser.
"The Game"
1. Forfeit the August you fell into an open manhole. Those years when people stole metal lids in the elasticity of nightfall and sold them off for grain money. Proceed forward fifty steps.
2. Abandon the two hours you spent tracing the chiseled characters on your mother's tombstone. How you drained your water bottle to loosen the inkpot. Chalky chrysanthemums you tore apart and tossed, so the vendor couldn't retrace your steps to reclaim them. Run a few hundred feet, loping through the gates of the burial ground.
3. Erase those years when the schools were shuttered across the nation. What else was there to do but chase your siblings on the factory floor where your parents shaved down wood planks? Where your mother lost a knuckle? You're ahead a dozen paces.
4. On the high-speed train from the eastern coast to the interior, the coarse skin of time sloughing off against the track. Worker, field, worker, field, field. Lighter, you're racing, slicing though thousands of miles.
5. What leaves with a person when they slide into a position vacated by the dead?
6. Oh, there's mother. Asleep in the pigsty, breathing through the mouth. The thick edges of youth on her, upon which so much attaches. Go back two hundred meters.
7. Do you recall the year when the universities reopened? Taking the gaokao, the nerve-network of Chinese youth that summer. All that coiled energy, pressurized from those lost years, without a release valve. You're slowing down.
8. And what of those translations of Western classics, ferried over from their originals in English and French, and exchanged furtively among acquaintances? So battered they came to you rent of covers and whole chapters, openings and endings. Is that you, lagging behind?
9. To gain pace, shed superstition, shed customs, shed any spiritual feeling.
10. But tell me: What is spiritual feeling?
11. A shadow curdling behind concrete.
12. And how did your mother go? That stab of her solitude. The slackness, then the tightening of muscle tissues. Is she gone? Then unfasten each stitch of her from the margin.
13. If you can efface the query, smudge away the detail of what preceded her death, you'll slip effortlessly past this bend in time.
14. Are you not guilty? Does your silence not hold something pungent behind it? What's that steam running through your sentences?
15. To recall too much reveals you have an abundance to hide. To remember too little means you're surely lying. Retrieve the city along the river where the building's shadows have become strange. The one that houses a frugal green rail station, where someone you once knew exchanged bills for a one-way ticket.
16. There were faces from those years wilder than anything the eye could imagine on its own, some bright red.
17. You're stalled.
18. So you understand this is a game, yes? That the rules of the game allow for order, and order allows for perfection?
19. The future is charitable, makes countless offers. A sickle lopping paper, the spokes of questions. To refuse memory is modern, see?
20. The severance happens with a paring knife, slowly, then all at once.
21. What stays in you is a sanctioned secret. What ends in you ends.
22. In time, you'll grow into a silence so clean, it'll feel like being emptied.
23. Run ahead, run ahead.
The Rupture Tense helped me understand my family, in stories I may never hear from them. Jenny Xie writes "Letting go is cheap. Forgetting, the cheapest." But pulling out the past through memory is a hard earned jewel; faceted, dirt-smeared, and rougher still to replace. Impossible (and undesirable) to stuff back into its rocky linings.
Her collection of ruptures and tenses reminded me of these lines from a (more romantic) Robert Hass poem: "When the memory of that time came... it was touched by strangeness because it formed no pattern with the other events in her life. It lay in her memory like one piece of coming up from the beach with a bucket full of something..."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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April 30, 2024"The background is milky fog, is solitary, is sight that is untold.
Edge closer. Friction from the future lies in the folds."
- Red Puncta
"One can, therefore, read the future from these photographs, something hastening.
Place of nothing before.
Place of nothing after."
- Memory Soldier
"Dream: an illusion that doesn't open by brute force, but by echo."
"The underside of sleep coloured at someone else's expense."
"Emotion rises to a stringent pitch
but refuses to spill.
Sound carries, location doesn't.
What doesn't get leached out, recedes."
"A pace that inoculates against the past tense."
"The sentence hollowing
out to make
room for what
rubs against
two languages..."
"If there's an afterlife, she's borrowing language from it."
"Q: How does the clandestine behave?
A: Sleeping tones.
A: Times when there's firmness
beneath the surface, suggesting bloat.
A: Unclothing of names.
A: Decades when the negatives return in double exposure.
A: Grinding growth of debt.
A: Look at how risk elongates
depending on the angle of exit."
"That we feel most deeply in the creases
between utterances."
- The Rupture Tense
"I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather it's lining." - Chris Marker, epigraph for Deep Storage
"A lie is a rhythm that marks truer things."
"Memory pulls the past out of its outlines and stuffs it back in all the wrong places."
"The dead do not end, they grow denser."
- Broken Proverbs
"To recede so deeply into a verb that one simply dissolves."
- Reaching Saturation
"Somewhere the shadow of your language
catches on my ear"
"The afterlife collects sentences of varying lengths."
"As you age, childhood's gradient intensifies."
- Distance Sickness
Edge closer. Friction from the future lies in the folds."
- Red Puncta
"One can, therefore, read the future from these photographs, something hastening.
Place of nothing before.
Place of nothing after."
- Memory Soldier
"Dream: an illusion that doesn't open by brute force, but by echo."
"The underside of sleep coloured at someone else's expense."
"Emotion rises to a stringent pitch
but refuses to spill.
Sound carries, location doesn't.
What doesn't get leached out, recedes."
"A pace that inoculates against the past tense."
"The sentence hollowing
out to make
room for what
rubs against
two languages..."
"If there's an afterlife, she's borrowing language from it."
"Q: How does the clandestine behave?
A: Sleeping tones.
A: Times when there's firmness
beneath the surface, suggesting bloat.
A: Unclothing of names.
A: Decades when the negatives return in double exposure.
A: Grinding growth of debt.
A: Look at how risk elongates
depending on the angle of exit."
"That we feel most deeply in the creases
between utterances."
- The Rupture Tense
"I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather it's lining." - Chris Marker, epigraph for Deep Storage
"A lie is a rhythm that marks truer things."
"Memory pulls the past out of its outlines and stuffs it back in all the wrong places."
"The dead do not end, they grow denser."
- Broken Proverbs
"To recede so deeply into a verb that one simply dissolves."
- Reaching Saturation
"Somewhere the shadow of your language
catches on my ear"
"The afterlife collects sentences of varying lengths."
"As you age, childhood's gradient intensifies."
- Distance Sickness
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 14, 2024
4.5 stars. For lack of a better touchstone for this kind of a work, it reminds me of the experimental liminality I feel immersed in at True / False film fest. From an organizational and formatting perspective, this is a collection of separate poems. The experience, however, feels more like one cohesive poem. Regardless of how you take it, I think two things stand out to me the most here: first, the visual language in this work is really incredible - specifically, the motif of photographic scenes really brings a lot out of the feelings that Xie is attempting to convey (and I use the word “attempt” as a favorable observation here, since this whole work feels that it is a struggling attempt to grasp the unspoken, unseen). Second, the variation in formatting of the poems through the work and within each poem is very strong. Even the more far-reaching experiments feel like they hit their marks to me, and the work is strongest every time she does the specific loose-phrase floating around each other thing.
The only two minor points against it in my mind (for me personally) are that 1. Sometimes the cold exactness of language that usually benefits the imagery and theme goes too far forward into something that feels distracting in a non-constructive way and 2. It’s cognitively dense enough that it was hard for me to feel like wanting to pick it up - which usually I would call a plus but I think, at least at this time, I’m trying to not let the pretentious side of me over-score art just because it made me struggle to hold my attention on it.
At the end, this is a fantastic work that I absolutely plan to come back to for inspiration.
The only two minor points against it in my mind (for me personally) are that 1. Sometimes the cold exactness of language that usually benefits the imagery and theme goes too far forward into something that feels distracting in a non-constructive way and 2. It’s cognitively dense enough that it was hard for me to feel like wanting to pick it up - which usually I would call a plus but I think, at least at this time, I’m trying to not let the pretentious side of me over-score art just because it made me struggle to hold my attention on it.
At the end, this is a fantastic work that I absolutely plan to come back to for inspiration.
December 28, 2022
Much of this collection is Xie examining her feelings about her life as a Chinese-American, and the extreme differences in life experience held between her and her Chinese relatives. Born in China and raised in the US, Xie has (per this collection) traveled to visit family. Her language skills are not quite what she wished for--and she considers the differences in experiences and expectations, and the difficulties in communicating (how much is language? how much is outlook?).
Other sections have to do with other artists' work. This was all work I am not familiar with, but I am very interested in Li Zhensheng's Red-Color News Soldier.
Other sections have to do with other artists' work. This was all work I am not familiar with, but I am very interested in Li Zhensheng's Red-Color News Soldier.
October 19, 2023
In 2019, after living in the United States for thirty years, poet Jenny Xie traveled to China and visited the place where she was born, seeing relatives from whom she had become somewhat estranged—or, if not estranged, perhaps defamiliarized. (Xie had left China at the age of four.) “It was a complicated experience,” she said in an interview with Maggie Millner, “and one thing that came out of it was an understanding of how much would disappear—memories, knowledge, textured impressions, life—when my older relatives pass on.”
Xie’s second book of poems, The Rupture Tense (Graywolf), largely results from this new understanding.
Read the entire review here: https://lasvegasreviewofbooks.com/poe...
Xie’s second book of poems, The Rupture Tense (Graywolf), largely results from this new understanding.
Read the entire review here: https://lasvegasreviewofbooks.com/poe...
November 20, 2025
I will echo what many reviewers have already said: the first half was more engaging than the second half. My eyes were starting to glaze over from "Deep Storage" until the end of the book.
The themes are very strongly communicated; the problems of memory, feeling disconnected, feeling alienated from family through increasing cultural divides, the fears and worries of a generation coming out of the Cultural Revolution... I loved it. However, like I've mentioned in previous reviews, the structure of the poems was a turn off, and Xie's phrasing in many poems (untraditional sentence structure, vague and unclear meanings, etc.) made it harder to connect with the collection.
The themes are very strongly communicated; the problems of memory, feeling disconnected, feeling alienated from family through increasing cultural divides, the fears and worries of a generation coming out of the Cultural Revolution... I loved it. However, like I've mentioned in previous reviews, the structure of the poems was a turn off, and Xie's phrasing in many poems (untraditional sentence structure, vague and unclear meanings, etc.) made it harder to connect with the collection.
December 10, 2022
Xie's writing appears on the page often with wide gaps between lines because the poetry itself is so thick with meaning, as so many of her poems in The Rupture Tense are about defining the self. Xie dives into that constantly elusive definition through setting, through artwork, through memory, through language. All often simultaneously. The titular poem, an epic in its own right, is so fascinating in its efforts to nail down on the page what it is unable to do, as that exploration itself is so absolutely the point. A magnificent collection.
January 17, 2023
Does humiliation multiply, with a reverb, with every gaze that serves as a witness? The future lures with its many eyes, on which the fields of judgment may be ploughed and ploughed.
Li’s camera can capture distance in a face. It can materialize a person’s doubt, so transparent is his lens. Yet the distance between the seen and the known can’t be crossed by the senses.
Li Zhensheng, still hunting the realm of the unsayable with his camera lens, directing it toward the furnace of the living.
In time, you’ll grow into a silence so clean, it’ll feel like being emptied.
Li’s camera can capture distance in a face. It can materialize a person’s doubt, so transparent is his lens. Yet the distance between the seen and the known can’t be crossed by the senses.
Li Zhensheng, still hunting the realm of the unsayable with his camera lens, directing it toward the furnace of the living.
In time, you’ll grow into a silence so clean, it’ll feel like being emptied.
December 11, 2025
Jenny Xie is one of my favorite poets of the Asian-American, and specifically Chinese-American, experience. Her poetics is lyrical, precise, analytic, which are all facets I enjoy. The heart of this book is her encounter/re-encounter of relatives she "left behind" in China in her family's emigration to the United States. There's an almost mythical quality to this visit, conjuring Odysseus and Aeneas in the underworld as well as Eliot's pavement encounter in "Little Gidding." As real as the past is, it's still no more than a shade.
August 23, 2025
As someone who famously does not get poetry, this still made me feel things! There’s a really cool, almost multimedia feel to the entire collection since Xie draws from aspects of photography and grammatical conventions to challenge our notions of past/present/future and how we move through time.
The last two sections in particular spoke the most to me, since I felt like there was a heavier focus on sound and diction as compared to imagery (more present in the earlier sections).
The last two sections in particular spoke the most to me, since I felt like there was a heavier focus on sound and diction as compared to imagery (more present in the earlier sections).
November 14, 2022
An engaging, precise, and high-quality collection. I think would’ve been better for some poems to have been paired with the photographs they were responding to (maybe an issue with the rights?). The title piece is excellent. The poems are not narrowly “about” subjects I can't personally much relate to but the themes are universal and the use of language is consistently beautiful.
February 1, 2023
Jenny Xie, The rupture tense: poems is a haunting home coming, a returning rupture, erasure’s witness to change.
“That we furnish the image internally
That the sonic dimension is asynchronous
That to make is to edit, and to edit is to scramble
That memory contains no vector
That we feel most deeply in the creases between utterances”
“That we furnish the image internally
That the sonic dimension is asynchronous
That to make is to edit, and to edit is to scramble
That memory contains no vector
That we feel most deeply in the creases between utterances”
June 28, 2023
I met Jenny Xie at the Dodge Festival and thought she was awesome; she signed a book for my daughter, who is also from Anhui. This book explores the present's relationship to the past: the act of remembering (or choosing to forget) the Cultural Revolution, and Xie's own emigration to the United States as a small child. I'm thinking I might teach it the next time I do my China course.
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