The Rupture Tense: Poems

"Chinese photojournalist Li Zhensheng’s astounding photos of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) were kept hidden until their publication 40 years later. Inspired by these images, Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense gives voice to powerful poetry of witness, capturing the poet’s unflinching gaze at both recorded history and forms of rupture – corporeal, metaphysical and environmental – triggered by Mao Zedong’s catastrophic movement that still impact her family. Affirming memory as a supple, restorative force, Xie incisively observes, “The left-behind and dead are alike / they travel / shouldering a simple bag, and form / the lightest of predictions / about how to make a passage.”"