Reviews and Interviews

The Exhausted Dream

Hong Kong Review of Books: “The modest appearance of A Monthly Account may delay its discovery by readers, but just as the FBI eventually caught up with Agonistes, readers will eventually get wind of it. And as the agent tailing Agonistes eventually fell in love with him, readers may fall in love with A Monthly Account for its narrative élan, its ingenuity in handling its formal constraints, and the surprising engineering of the redemption of its speaker.” - Review by Paul Scott Stanfield

And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight

The Rumpus: “Xu spins this continuous shifting into the book, and the body, from the start. The title conveys precisely this balance between knowing and uncertainty: And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight is kind of incomprehensible. [. . .] [T]he book is that strangest of all contemporary poetic endeavors, the opposite of the dominant, distilled lyric moment: a progression. A journey.” - Review by S. Brook Corfman

Oxford Review of Books: “The anxiety of a year’s ending contains the fear of a new beginning. With the pendulum’s swing, Xu reminds us that the motion of the clock’s hands is powered by a circumscribed movement: there is no tick without a tock.” - Review by Sylee Gore

The Adroit Journal: "The conjunction of this figure with a Chinese cultural backdrop seems to entangle it with Xiwangmu (Western Mother), a mythological deity associated with millenarianism, first attested in the second millennium BC. Sidelined by masculine Confucian ethos over much of Chinese history, Xiwangmu was frequently revived as a figure of worship in periods of social upheaval. In this context, Xu’s book could almost be a twenty-first-century prayer book for Xiwangmu’s arrival and ensuing rejuvenation of society. This dovetails with the deep historical connection between revolution and surrealist literary style, most pertinently in Vallejo’s España, aparta de mí este cáliz and Poemas Humanos, both written in response to the Spanish Civil War. And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight draws on this history to assert a visionary poetics, aimed at constructing an alternative, freer world of both language and political existence." - Review by Angelo Mao

Plume: “If we think of the book as a kind of moonlit vase able to hold ashen heaps, we might consider Xu’s project as cosmic, elegiac, cyclic. A project bound by time and space between its printed covers, yet somehow unbound by conventions on the page.” - Review by Timothy Liu

BOMB Magazine: “When it came time to make a book, I wanted to give bodily integrity to what, for me, is the most mysterious dimension of the book: the turning of the page.” - Interview with Tim Johnson

Pee Poems

Hong Kong Review of Books: “Lao Yang’s verses vary in structure, ensuring rhythm and consistency of movement and tone as well as the propulsive benefit of sudden variation.” - Review by Brendan Riley

Action Books: "Yang’s status as a piss person not only underscores the socio-political conditions attached to the body’s excesses, but urination is also an extension of a wider political ecology, where ideas of freedom and autonomy are often contested subjects." - Review by Orchid Tierney

On the Seawall: "Pee Poems is written from exile, from loneliness, from an understanding of real suffering, but it is not defeated. It finds its community in its translators, its solace in its deep faith, and its futurity in a rigorous opposition to any restraint. It plays because it has the urge; it moves because it has to go." - Review by Nick Admussen

Stanza Break: "Yang skewers the despondency that can crystallize in the minds of citizens of empire and totalitarianism." - Review by Timothy Otte

Colorado Review: "Lao Yang’s Pee Poems, translated from Chinese by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, is a stunning reinvention of the mundane and visceral." - Review by Tashiana Seebeck

Full Stop: "[A]t its core, Pee Poems is a chronicle of how a poet, through his medium, survives and transcends the hardships of displacement and stark sociopolitical realities, without ever losing a stubborn, scabrous sense of vitality." - Review by Angelo Mao

The Double Lamp of Solitude

Harriet Books: "Throughout this book, which meditates on reading and writing, solitude and intimacy, and time (and its attendants, history and change), Edwards plays with perspective, leaning in to the traveler’s point of view—using the ‘eye’ as a camera to describe ‘present pleasures / anchored in the past,’ the quotidian, the road—while also stretching, with subtle poetic craftsmanship, the limits of his own subjective mapmaking. Sometimes, using the second person, he casts the reader into the periplum." - Review by Heather Green