And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight

Description Reviews Part protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth, Lynn Xu’s book-length poem, And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, holds fast to our fragile utopias. Under the auspice of birth and the contingency of this beginning, time opens: Ecstatic, melancholy, and defiant, the voices of the poem flicker between life and death, gorgeous and gruesome, visionary and intimate. Here reposes the reverie-inducing freedom of Rilke and Proust, where you get to say ‘dreaming’ twice, or a thousand times, and even ‘et cetera’ twice, in case you forgot to fill in the blank with your own lyrical, rapture-adjacent images the first time. Johnny Payne, Merion West In And Those Ashen Heaps, Xu’s second collection, time is the stage on which the drama of coming-into-life occurs. The book begins at ‘a windbreak of gum trees / et cetera / th