PositiveThe Poetry FoundationXie’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. Aphoristic and elegant, The Rupture Tense articulates a lucid but challenging wisdom from the interstices of our inner lives.
Jos Charles
RavePoetry FoundationIf sculpting words midair or immersing oneself in the proximity of an otherness are metaphysical tasks, they are also transcendences that poets yearn for and readers seek from poetry...In a Year & other Poems, the speaker\'s struggles toward selfhood as a trans person, one whose identity is arrived at in adversity, form a captivating backdrop to Charles\'s elucidation of liminal spaces...The result is a beautiful, elemental poetry that navigates the eponymous year, witnessing the travails of an afflicted, declining nation and alighting on a \'you\' who may be a beloved, oneself, or a past identity that the self has subsumed, as in the speaker\'s delicate sorrow over a changed name from her changeless past.
