RaveThe New York Times Book Reviewt takes a poet to invent characters who argue that \'the voice must be sung into existence.\' It takes a novelist to honor so many perspectives, histories and intimacies in one book ... Reminds us that we are one and many.
Jenny Xie
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewXie ingeniously leverages Western prosody to expose the fracture between the \'Asian\' and \'American\' aspects of Asian American identity ... The sonic passage from \'native\' to \'naïve\' to \'knavery\' reverberates with an amplifying sense of fraudulence that assimilated Asian Americans (including middle-aged South Asian book reviewers) sometimes feel on their itineraries of self-discovery ... It may very well be that the constant rebuilding we call identity depends on a kind of forgetting. The most resonant irony of “The Rupture Tense” is that its author’s first language, Mandarin, makes no use of verb tenses at all. There are other, maybe countless, ways of giving shape to time.
Dana Levin
RaveThe New York Times... feels to me like a message from an old friend who’s emerged, dazed, from a punishing bout of writer’s block ... Levin freely shares the self-doubts, false starts and dead ends of her return to poetry in this unguarded literary experiment. If this sounds emotionally risky and artistically gutsy, it is.
