Oh!insolentturdcompetingfor the latrinesof yesterday—allnightlongupon the public shouldersof the infinitesimalinsideand yesterdayeven nowthe streetlamps are litwith the destinyof the definitive: doorswindowsforeheadsstars . . .the newborn tonguewhich struggles with its mortaladvances against theexterminatingalphabet in the unvitiatedasylum of the moon’spickpocket— whyeven a bearetc.through the tears and furin the trellisedgirdersof the double rainbow . . .allthatisswift andlivingin the meantimetaking shapewith obviouspoverty therebeing nogood and evilonlya chainwhich rattlesand resoundsin usas bells
And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight (excerpt)
Lynn Xu
Feature Date
- September 3, 2022
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
from And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, copyright 2022 by Lynn Xu.
Used with permission of the author and Wave Books.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Joshua Edwards
Joshua Edwards
Born in Shanghai, Lynn Xu is the author of Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn) and And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight (Wave Books), and the co-translator of Pee Poems by Lao Yang (Circumference Books). She has performed multidisciplinary works at 300 South Kelly Street, the Guggenheim Museum, the Renaissance Society, and Rising Tide Projects. She teaches at Columbia University and coedits Canarium Books.
Part protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth, Lynn Xu's book-length poem, And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, holds fast to our fragile utopias. Under the auspice of birth and the contingency of this beginning, time opens: ecstatic, melancholy, and defiant, the voices of the poem flicker between life and death, gorgeous and gruesome, visionary and intimate.
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
