Eye Level: Poems by Jenny Xie

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Juan Felipe Herrera

Jenny Xies award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. The sensual worlds herecolors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapesbring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen. As Xie writes, Me? Im just here in my travelers clothes, trying on each passing town for size. Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. Xie is a poet of extraordinary perceptionboth to the tangible world and to all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach.