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EYE LEVEL: POEMS Graywolf Press Eye Level takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. The sensual worlds here—colors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes—bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen. As Xie writes, “Me? I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.” Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. Xie is a poet of extraordinary perception—both to the tangible world and to “All that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach.” |
National Book Award Finalist, Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, PEN America Open Book Award Finalist, Dylan Thomas Prize Semifinalist, Larry Levis Reading Prize
A Nivel del Ojo: Eye Level, translated into Spanish by Marta del Pozo Ortea, Vaso Roto Ediciones
"How many lives have been lived inside Jenny Xie's brief life? I'm guessing the number is staggering, as is the wisdom I find in her remarkable debut. Eye Level renders the world with such lyric precision, such a quiet hugeness of spirit, such fresh astonishment. Already I am certain Xie's is one of the voices that will help me, quite simply, to live." - Tracy K. Smith
“‘Between Hanoi and Sapa’ this collection begins and continues with its ‘frugal mouth’ that ‘spends the only foreign words it owns.’ This knowing ‘travels’ in a spiral-shaped wisdom. We go places; we enter multiple terrains of seeing; we cross cultural borders of time, voices, locations—of consciousness. Then—we notice we are in a trembling stillness with all beings and all things. Jenny Xie’s Eye Level is a timely collection of beauty, clarity, and expansive humanity.” - Juan Felipe Herrera
"What a sheer and complex joy it is to read this book. I've never seen this precise combination of clarity, depth, heart, and loveliness—Jenny Xie's Eye Level makes me linger over every breathtaking line and has me in a trance. Poem after poem is more than beautiful; they're works of art made of fluid self and sharp life and the author's singular intelligence, her feral imagination. To the question 'who am I?' this poet answers 'where I am' and finds new, dazzling questions in every discovery."- Brenda Shaughnessy
SELECTED REVIEWS AND PRESS:
“Xie comes across as a magician of perspective and scale. . . Xie’s swallowed commands, shorn of their predicates, suggest that the rules of her art cannot be codified. Xie knows the truth of what Wallace Stevens said about the power of poems: supplementing the manifest world with innuendo and nuance, supplying sound to spectacle, they make 'the visible / a little hard to see.' What happens at eye level gets its start in the depths. ” - The New Yorker
“The poems in [Xie’s] crystalline debut. . .are ever alert to the complex relationship between geography and the self.” - New York Times Book Review
“Xie combines the lightness of a carnet de voyage with the incisiveness of a documentary exposé . . . Eye Level ’s greatest strengths lie in the questioning nature of Xie’s curiosities, as well as her riveting use of adjectives—'medium-rare insomnia,' 'fatty grief,' 'itchy blue,' to name only a few—which glide atop an alliterative style that compels one to read the book cover to cover in a single sitting, like a novel. ” - Poetry
"A discerning eye is at work in this debut collection; Xie has a voice at once ironic and poised, restless and deeply meditative. These are poems of meticulous wildness, like the insights that come during a dark night of the soul and are reexamined in the light of day. . . Stealthily beautiful, Eye Level is one of those immersive books that changes you as you read it." - Vulture
“. . .we remain burrowed in the mind of this magnificent poet, who braids in the lonesomeness and sorrow of being unmoored and on your own.” - The Paris Review, Staff Picks
“This debut, which Juan Felipe Herrera chose as the 2017 winner of the Walt Whitman Award, explores rootlessness and identity, geography and loneliness, the physical world and 'all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach.'” - The Washington Post
"Xie's debut collection offers an atmospheric and sensual journey through Vietnam and elsewhere, the layers of the self peeling back on foreign soil to reveal a nourishing self-estrangement. These lyrical poems meditate on the experience of seeing and of being seen, the excess of either by turns testing something less visible within us. Xie masterfully articulates the most brief, illusory aspects of perception, and the ambiguities that accompany them." - Publisher's Weekly, Staff Picks
"But perhaps it’s enough to say this: Eye Level illustrates that the borders are porous. To acknowledge this, minding their paradoxes and contradictions, decentralizes the power of sight. It means, in our own spectacular time, we can walk and write our way toward a sensitive appraisal of the visible, the invisible, and the continuum between." -Jacket2
"Whether because of its vivid imagery, sustained meditations, or deft language making, Eye Level continues to resonate well after one finishes the book and calls a reader back for a second, third, or fourth reading. . .Xie’s eye is a globe with an irresistible gravitational pull, drawing toward it subjects of its seeing like moons that, in turn, influence the tides of attention—the poet’s and the reader’s." -Blackbird
“For a poet so capable of taking readers on far-flung journeys to places like Corfu, Cambodia, and New York, Xie is perhaps most remarkable for her ability to take readers deeper inside themselves than they have ever been. . .Xie’s work is just a thing of pure, piercing beauty.” - NYLON
"As the title suggests, the fulcrum of the book is Xie’s radical looking, following the premise that noticing equals preservation and sense-making. However, her sense of sight surpasses the eye and encompasses all senses, while restlessly searching for an eye that can turn inward and scrutinize the 'I.'" -Poetry Project
"In an age of self-confession, Eye Level stands out for many reasons, not least Jenny Xie’s incomparable ability to disclose the secret contours of the self while also displaying remarkable restraint, leaving the mystery of personhood secure in its innermost chamber. This is as much a book of wisdom as it is poetry." - Literary Hub
"Xie keeps her readers firmly outside of her head, at eye level, watching the world. And with her sweeping, exact language, watching the world with Xie is nothing but a pleasure." - VOX
"Sight, an inherently limited sense, is in the eye of the beholder, Xie reminds us: it conjures only a tiny slice of a landscape. What we notice represents bits and pieces of a life here and there, like a shifting kaleidoscope. This message is one Xie exquisitely enumerates in Eye Level, and one that any traveler or wanderer should take to heart. " - The Georgia Review
“Eye Level shows the myriad ways that thought and attention can impel, prevent, and distract vision, directing us both toward and away from the fragmented sights that form our conception of the world.” - Debutantes
“. . .an exquisite interrogation of perspective and selfhood but also reaches out to something more elusive — the troubled way language can isolate and put up borders. . . even after so many words, Xie reminds us there’s always another sentence our minds can write, always another moment of bewilderment heading our way.” - Michigan Quarterly Review