Jenny Xie

Time to consider a poem by contemporary poet Jenny Xie, author of “Eye Level”, winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the National Book Award in 2018.

Born in Anhui, China and raised in New Jersey, Xie lives in New York City and teaches at Bard College.

Ongoing

Never mind the distances traveled, the companion
she made of herself. The threadbare twenties not
to be underestimated. A wild depression that ripped
from January into April. And still she sprouts an appetite.
Insisting on edges and cores, when there were none.
Relationships annealed through shared ambivalences.
Pages that steadied her. Books that prowled her
until the hard daybreak, and for months after.
Separating new vows from the old, like laundry whites.
Small losses jammed together so as to gather mass.
Stored generations of filtered quietude.
And some stubbornness. Tangles along the way
the comb-teeth of the mind had to bite through, but for what.
She had trained herself to look for answers at eye level,
but they were lower, they were changing all the time.

--Jenny Xie

.