Debts & Lessons

“Language exists because nothing exists between those/ who express themselves,” Xu announces in the first sequence of her debut, wherein “The rustling of form is a sign of voice” and “The earth [is] all symbol.” Here, Xu brings to mind Anne Carson and Susan Howe, especially with regard to form, and Lyn Hejinian, in her relationship to language. The first four sections, “Say You Will Die For Me,” “Our Love Is Pure,” “Earth Light,” and “Enemy of the Absolute,” are especially reminiscent of Carson’s style and voice: “Turn your ghost that/ Way such that I may mine, and with what.” “Whose attending spirit holds me thus?...Of words be beggarly, be master and native/ To the gleaming glade.” In the penultimate section “Lullabies,” Xu addresses Shelley, Mandelstam, Berryman, and others in poems that blur the voice of the poet and the addressee, or as Xu puts it, “are frank with apostrophes and with crossings.” The final section, “Debts & Lessons,” takes its title from the opening of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Here, Xu moves to more familiar territory with form, drawing on the combined weight of history and recent events in a poem of startling breadth and impressions: “And fire could find no syllable no/ Common cave to slow/ Our blindness which poetry/ Then forgave/ Returning us to our meadowed paths.” While she looks back at her forebears, Xu gives fans of contemporary experimental poetry much to love. (Apr.)