# The Past - Paperback

by **Wendy Xu** (Author)

**Elegiac and searching, poems written in the long shadow of immigration**  
  
The poems in Wendy Xu's third collection, _The Past_, fantasize uneasily about becoming a palatable lyric record of their namesake, while ultimately working to disrupt this Westernized desire. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, Wendy Xu immigrated to the United States in 1989, three days ahead of the events of Tian'anmen Square. _The Past_ probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, and immigration as an ongoing psychic experience without end. Moving spontaneously between lyric, fragment, prose, and subversions in "traditional" Chinese forms, the book culminates in a centerpiece series of "Tian'anmen Square sonnets" (and their subsequent erasures), to conjure up the irrepressible past, and ultimately imagine a new kind of poem: at once code and confession.  
  
"Tian'anmen Sonnet" (dead air in air ... )  
  
Dead air in air  
The anniversary of language  
holds you back against  
bucolic dreaming, down stream  
from here is running  
a miraculous color, elegy  
  
bursts like a ribbon in air  
Thinking again of the Square today  
Bold sky, passing episodes of cloud  
Vegetation mutters in the Far West  
  
A column of ghosts  
going violet over time  
Familiar song looping overhead  
Lines pressed in air

### Author Biography

WENDY XU (Brooklyn, NY) is the author of _Phrasis_, named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by the _New York Times Book Review_. She teaches writing at the New School, and serves as Poetry Editor for the arts magazine _Hyperallergic_.

**Number of Pages:** 104

**Dimensions:** 0.4 x 8.9 x 5.9 IN

**Publication Date:** September 07, 2021

## Details

- **Price:** 17.23 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 17.23 USD | In stock |

## Images

- The Past - Paperback

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