The poems in Lynn Xu’s debut collection, Debts & Lessons, travel under the power of history’s illusory engine and echo its ululations of love, violence, and lament. Named after the first part of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, this book also finds its way across oceans and between languages, as the poet looks to the dead for guidance amid the abstractions of contemporary life. Xu pays her phantoms (and her readers) with the dream-currency of hallucinatory songs, which balance her finely-tuned ear against a world of awakenings. [Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.]

“Lynn Xu’s Debts & Lessons is a book of influences and emanations. Finding their namesake in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Xu’s poems consider acts of goodness, kindness, and deliberation. Yet Xu’s apprenticeship in the classical comes up against the absurd demonic bleakness of other lessons—those we find in Macbeth and hellish passages from Dante, Eliot, and Milton. Hers is a poetry of theodicy and, as she traces the features of her own face in the faces of the past, striking originality.” —Susan Stewart

“With sharp turns and tunings of breath, line, and body (of water, of knowledge, of work) it comes to me—this magnificent, long-awaited first book by Lynn Xu, Debts & Lessons. In the uneasy currents which speed the organs, it sings the dead to sleep, traveling with uncompromising largesse. Language breaks open in the double currency of love and translation. ‘Life flows backward into night.’ Ask me how long I have waited for this book—’Say river,’ say desire.” —Sawako Nakayasu