The Rupture Tense

In Jenny Xie’s second collection, The Rupture Tense, the speaker misconjugates the tense of a word and, correcting herself, murmurs, “I strike myself with the belt of a wrong tense.” If her ruptures of “tense”—of the temporal aspect of verbs, of Time itself, of tension and anxiety—are a form of violence, they are meditations on disjunction or “discreation” that become constructive and creative as they collapse different times and cultures into a poem’s moment. Focusing on a shadowy figure in a photograph of Red Guards from the 1960s, the speaker revels in paradox: 

Unknowability, a deep-reaching mold, rendering her all the more lucid. To be cleared of meaning, a kind of freedom only the opaque can claim. Even the loudest metaphor can’t get a firm hold on her. 

Through longer sequences and briefer lyrics about a photographer who documented the Cultural Revolution, visits to Xie’s family in Anhui, China, and Xie’s grandmother, who died “by her own hand” in 1977, Xie portrays how “unknowability” makes something more “lucid,” how a journey to one’s birth country moves beyond “stale tropes” to “checkpoints / of your own making.” Mesmerizingly detailed—“Irony in how he keeps his pinky fingernails untrimmed, to broadcast his freedom from manual labor”—her pieces on China avoid hackneyed epiphanies about ancestral identity in favor of unspooling “the crooked film reel of your origins.” Xie’s obliquity about other matters of personal experience, like love and work, may arise from a universalizing impulse, which ruptures the expectation of confessional autobiography through stylistic choices like the impersonal first-person-plural (“We who are made    mostly of distance”). Aphoristic and elegant, The Rupture Tense articulates a lucid but challenging wisdom from the interstices of our inner lives, as the title sequence attests: 

That to make is to edit, and to edit is to scramble
That memory contained no vector
That we felt most deeply in the creases between utterances
That repetition in this life is an impossibility
That to shake open the mouth was to let something fall out of
one’s life