Description
Fence Books, 2017
Taking as her material the phrase, rather than the sentence, Xu moves in her second collection from thought to thought in ways that often feel mysterious, practically magical, outside grammars expected bounds. This is a collection I find exhilarating for how it perplexes me. How did that abstraction just turn into an image? How did that image just morph into an abstraction? I gladly give these poems my heightened attention and surrender.
Gabrielle Bates
***
from “Phrasis” (II)
_______
Imagine a person upon whom nothing is lost,
pulling the purple cabbages up head by head, half
like devotional
Those welts blossom your skin plural, you looking
at me like nothing I need
_______
I put down the mildest impressions of light, strict
bodied, giving you uninvaded space and how divided?
Referring to the self in thirds, he there of the bent
frame, she shaded in multiplicities of orange, red
_______
All color is gratuitous smeared against the grain, red
fang glowing just hangs there, shakes a gaunt leaf off
After breaking particularly long period of hermitage,
you reek again of industry
_______
I could watch you dream big from your station in
lief, mutually silence holds our friends together
in this trying, these times
In upper and lower variance my attitude was polite,
in two days sounds the house again of you
_______
What if truly one builds an empire of doubt, waters
it and thus sensationally, blasts into newer years, a year
Your sentence riddles me darkly, flows hard, a mist
of blue inks pushed across the wider canvas
_______
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