Can I read The Past (Wesleyan Poetry Series) on EtoBox?

The Past (Wesleyan Poetry Series) by Wendy Xu is a work of fiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Past (Wesleyan Poetry Series) about?

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. Who is "the past" for, after all, and what does it allow? Both sorrow and joy are found in these poems, knit into the silences and slippery untrustworthinesses of the English language. 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 on June 4th—the poems of The Past partly concern the emotional reverberations of this annual double-anniversary, the place at which "the past" forked, over thirty years ago, putting the author on a path to the United States. The Past probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, the illness and passing of the author's uncle and maternal grandfather in 2018, 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), an original form built from iterations of

Who reads The Past (Wesleyan Poetry Series)?

Author

Wendy Xu

Publisher

Wesleyan University Press

Published

2021

Language

EN

ISBN

9780819580474

Category

work of fiction

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Humanities