The Poetry Book Club "The Rupture Tense" by Jenny Xie

The Poetry Book Club led by Doug Knowlton. March’s selection is “The Rupture Tense” by Jenny Xie

This monthly book club led by Doug is for those who like to read and discuss poetry. It celebrates the integral role of poets and poetry in life and literature. March’s selection is The Rupture Tense , the astounding second collection by Jenny Xie, “a magician of perspective and scale” ( The New Yorker ).
We will meet in person at our new store location at 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $17 which includes a copy of The Rupture Tense to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.
About Rupture Tense:
Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory—historical, collective, personal—stains and erodes. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged.

The Rupture Tense begins with poems provoked by the photography of Li Zhensheng, whose negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and concludes with an aching elegy for the poet’s grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end of the Revolution. This extraordinary collection records the aftershocks and long distances between those years and the present, echoing out toward the ongoing past and a trembling future.
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level , a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award and winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Bard College and lives in New York City.
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All signed up and unable to go? Please let us know! Seating is limited and there may be people on our waitlist who would like to to take your place. Please send an email to bryn@sarasotabooks.com ASAP and hopefully we’ll see you next time.
Click here to go to the Bookstore1 Sarasota website. https://www.sarasotabooks.com/