Overview

Moving freely between essay, close-reading, ekphrasis, memoir, travelogue, lecture notes, poetry, and even monologue, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds presents a series of “thinking-throughs” of formally innovative and politically oriented poets pushing the boundaries of what poetry can hold. Tracing a personal family history of immigration amidst larger concerns of diaspora, “unsayability,” and absence, Wendy Xu reads the work of poets including Layli Long Soldier, Inger Christensen, Ocean Vuong, Liu Xia, giovanni singleton, Bei Dao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and others. She explores existential and pedagogical questions in poetry from the point of view of a reader and a teacher. Why write? and why invite the paradoxes of a documentary approach into that writing? Not an overview or primer, least of all the final word, this free-ranging exploration of contemporary poetry considers larger questions of belonging, diaspora, the violence of language, the allure of the past, genre, witness, and form. It returns to memorable touchstone texts in the author’s life with renewed curiosity about their inner workings. Essays move with restless curiosity across topics, bringing them into conversation with poetry, from considering depictions of Christ in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, to the ecstatic illegible texts of Henri Michaux, discomfiting likenesses of agoraphobia and political imprisonment, and the epistolary trouble of fan-mail. Xu is drawn to poetry works of radical hybridity alongside personal experiences of formal intensity, as an immigrant daughter, a parentified child, an occasional agoraphobe, and a writer. Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds is a tour of poetic influences and the futures they’ve made possible.

Full Product Details

Author:   Wendy Xu
Publisher:   The University of Michigan Press
Imprint:   The University of Michigan Press
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9780472040001

ISBN 10:   0472040006
Pages:   194
Publication Date:   06 October 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

List of Figures Part One Reading Wang Wei in a Pandemic Writing Home: on Diasporic Language, Immigration, and Documentary Praxis Documentary Traces, Relatability, and the Limits of Witness Notes from the Writing of an Unwritten Novel Agoraphobe Logics: on Liu Xia, Agoraphobia, and Doubles Monologue on Intention Disappear Yourself: Unsayability in Henri Michaux and Chase Berggrun Part Two Things to Do with Form Ghost(s) Of giovanni singleton’s American Forms (Black Sisyphus; Don’t Shoot) Three Transformations: Long Soldier, Atiya, and Alexander The Destruction of the Earth is the Destruction of All Childhoods What is the Present For? Mignon, or, Further Notes on the Past Notes for a Cancelled Short Lecture on Reversible and Coded Form(s) Wendy Xu and Emily Lee Luan on Return, Form, and Longing Part Three “Unfinished is Business”: on Fandom and Stardom, Genre, and Playing Your Role Paris Book What I Don’t Know About ’89: Meeting My Baba in Poetry Notes for an Opening (2015-2020) Part Four On Teaching

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Author Information

Wendy Xu is Assistant Professor of Writing at The New School. She is the author of three books, including Phrasis, which New York Times Book Review named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017.

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