Debts & Lessons
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Omnidawn Publishing
Published:1st May '13
Should be back in stock very soon
The poems in Lynn Xu's striking debut collection, Debts & Lessons, travel under the power of history's illusory engine and echo its ululations of love, violence, and lament. Named after the first part of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, this book also finds its way across oceans and between languages, as the poet looks to the dead for guidance amid the abstractions of contemporary life. Xu pays her phantoms (and her readers) with the dream-currency of hallucinatory songs, which balance her finely-tuned ear against a world of awakenings.
"Lynn Xu makes the poetic line a little theater where the belatedness of language is felt--and sometimes lulled into suspension. [She] is an expert at multiplying sites of resonance and ambiguity, of conjoining or confusing epochs and zones." -- Ben Lerner, Boston Review "Lynn Xu's Debts & Lessons is a book of influences and emanations... Hers is a poetry of theodicy and, as she traces the features of her own face in the faces of the past, striking originality." -- Susan Stewart, author, The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making "Xu brings to mind Anne Carson and Susan Howe, especially with regard to form, and Lyn Hejinian, in her relationship to language... While she looks back at her forebears, Xu gives fans of contemporary experimental poetry much to love." -- Publishers Weekly (18 March 2013)
- Commended for L.A. Times Book Prize (Poetry) 2013
ISBN: 9781890650803
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
96 pages