Wendy Xu, Linguistic Cubist

Jaime Zuckerman reviews Wendy Xu's Phrasis (Fence Books, 2017) for the current issue of Diode. "Her technique is something like linguistic cubism," writes Zuckerman in a consideration of Xu's fragmented "lines and leaps." An excerpt:

Language, here, is tangible and physical. It may have tortured movements and be broken, but it is still tender. There is something lovely and sad as the word regards its own shadow and a small part of us, just a finger, is set to music. The entire collection uses words and language as a Duchamp might use form to depict a nude descending a staircase. Even as Xu expresses a strange dissociation between herself and the language she uses, her poems settle into the paradox: language is her medium for making that dissociation—between the self and the world, between the word and its meaning or manifestation— apparent, something tangible, sensual even, for her readers.

The epigraph from John Weiners, “No circles / but that two parallels do cross,” illuminates how Xu approaches language as its own geometry, one where she can bend the syntactical and poetic laws to make space for impossibilities. The poems in the collection are sprinkled with geometric references and images; often a window frame serves as a lens through which the speaker narrates. The geometries serve as a metaphoric parallel for language—both are man-made abstractions meant to express the messy and unspeakableness of living life in the real world. And Xu’s poems are determined to point to the fragility of geometric and linguistic constructions. For example, in “Diagonal Sun,” she ends with the lines, “The dream of the grid bent over / there in the sun” suggesting the straight lines of diagonals and grids are perfectly bendable if we remember the enormity of the sun. The little human moments of each poem in the collection provide context for how small we are—“to clouds I am too little”—and how small our ways of making sense of living (mathematical terms, word meanings, etc.) are as well.

You may read the review in full at Diode.