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A review by kxiong5
The Past by Wendy Xu
5.0
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--