Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Juan Felipe Herrera
Eye Level
Poems
- Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry
For years now, I’ve been using the wrong palette.
Each year with its itchy blue, as the bruise of solitude reaches its expiration date.
Planes and buses, guesthouse to guesthouse.
I’ve gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight,
my overreactive motion sickness.
9 p.m., Hanoi’s Old Quarter: duck porridge and plum wine.
Voices outside the door come to a soft boil.
—from “Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season”
Each year with its itchy blue, as the bruise of solitude reaches its expiration date.
Planes and buses, guesthouse to guesthouse.
I’ve gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight,
my overreactive motion sickness.
9 p.m., Hanoi’s Old Quarter: duck porridge and plum wine.
Voices outside the door come to a soft boil.
—from “Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season”
Jenny Xie’s award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. The sensual worlds here—colors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes—bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen. As Xie writes, “Me? I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.” Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. Xie is a poet of extraordinary perception—both to the tangible world and to “All that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach.”
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About the Author
Credit: Teresa Mathew
Praise
- “Xie comes across as a magician of perspective and scale. . . . [Eye Level] suggests a kind of Fodor’s or Lonely Planet guide to inner life.”—The New Yorker
- “The poems in [Xie’s] crystalline debut . . . are ever alert to the complex relationship between geography and the self.”—The New York Times Book Review
- “Xie’s poems take us on a journey to new places . . . in such vivid detail that you'll feel as if you really traveled, as well as to new questions about immigration, identity, and loneliness.”—BuzzFeed
- “A discerning eye is at work in this debut collection; Xie has a voice at once ironic and poised, restless and deeply meditative. . . . Stealthily beautiful, Eye Level is one of those immersive books that changes you as you read it.”—Vulture
