Research Catalog

Title

Nowhere to arrive : poems / Jenny Xie.

Author

Xie, Jenny

Publication

• Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2017.
• ©2017

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Abani, Chris

Description

x, 33 pages; 18 cm.

Summary

Nowhere to Arrive takes as its subjects the whiplash of travel, the shuttling between disparate places and climes, and an unremitting sense of dislocation. These poems court the tension between the familiar and the foreign, between the self as distinct and the self as illusory. They look plainly at the startling strangeness of varied landscapes and mindscapes, and interrogate a state of unrootedness?one thrown into relief by the speaker's years abroad in Southeast Asia. At the chapbook's center are two long poems, titled "Phnom Penh Diptych: Wet Season" and "Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season," that examine the escapist narratives that draw tourists and expatriates to Cambodia, and the speaker?s own privileged positioning. On a formal level, the poems in Nowhere to Arrive make room for the unsaid and that which cannot be articulated. Here, we have a vocabulary of silence alongside stark imagistic juxtapositions, poems that celebrate compression and the force of paratactic constructions. Attentiveness and concentration emerge as virtues, as the speaker surveys the vast territory of the present with a wakeful gaze.

Series Statement

The drinking gourd chapbook poetry prize

Uniform Title

Drinking gourd chapbook poetry prize

Subject

• Travel > Poetry
• Travel

Genre/Form

Poetry

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Foreword by Chris Abani -- Rootless -- Phnom Penh diptych: wet season -- Phnom Penh diptych: dry season -- Corfu -- Displacement -- Fortified -- Epistle -- Ongoing.

ISBN

• 9780810135086
• 0810135086

LCCN

^^2016044877

OCLC

• 959275734
• SCSB-11493844

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library