User:Amay1355/Eye Level

Eye Level is a collection of 41 Poems written by American poet Jenny Xie. It was Published by Graywolf Press on April 3rd, 2018. The collection hosts the experiences, emotions, thoughts, words of encouragement, and observations of the many travels around the world Xie has ventured. It won the Walt Whitman Award in 2017, nominated by Juan Felipe Herrera.

Themes
In an interview with Jennifer Hijazi, a news assistant for the PBS NewsHour, Xie mentioned that when beginning the collection she had no central theme used throughout her process. Xie says that it was not until after, when she noticed a theme of observation. She mentions how when writing, Xie would think about a memory, and then use that memory to create a poem for her work. She would use "saturated language" to best describe her experiences in the way she wanted. In the work titled "Long Nights" the saturated language is shown: “Water striders on a pond’s surface, / light as calipers: / long sentences for which there are no words.” The Theme of observation and use of saturated language allows the reader to get a picture of what the author was trying to portray, in this case the striding water on the surface of the pond.

Awards

 * 2018 National Book Award Finalist

"Interiority and restlessness permeate Jenny Xie’s Eye Level, which meditates on the itinerant body and identity, examining shifting and rarely solidifying experiences of solitude, estrangement, and belonging". Statement from the National Book Foundation about award recipient and poetic collection.


 * 2018 Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University

“I’m very honored to be awarded a prize from those who did so much to shape who I am both on the page and off as a reader, a writer, and a mind. I owe an unpayable debt of gratitude to my professors in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, and to be recognized by the Holmes Prize is a great joy and deeply meaningful to me in manifold ways.” Jenny Xie, acceptance speech for the National Poetry Prize.


 * 2017 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets

“‘Between Hanoi and Sapa’ this collection begins and continues with its ‘frugal mouth’ that ‘spends the only foreign words it owns.’ This knowing ‘travels’ in a spiral-shaped wisdom. We go places; we enter multiple terrains of seeing; we cross cultural borders of time, voices, locations—of consciousness. Then—we notice we are in a trembling stillness with all beings and all things. Jenny Xie’s Eye Level is a timely collection of beauty, clarity, and expansive humanity.” Juan Felipe Herrera, judge’s statement for the Walt Whitman Award.

Reviews
Augusta Funk from the Michigan Quarterly Review, wrote a review on the collection and titled it "Cracking the lens: a Review of Jenny Xie's "Eye Level". In the review, Funk explains how the poetry enclosed in the collection is of such variety, saying "Xie’s frame widens and welcomes Keatsian negative capability, or perhaps more so, Fanny Howe’s bewilderment, just as much as she burrows into specificity". Funk also goes on to say that the collection houses so many different emotions and feelings to be discovered throughout the readings, and that "Eye Level" is an "exquisite interrogation of perspective and selfhood but also reaches out to something more elusive".

Table of Contents
Rootless

•

Unspoiled Fictions

Phnom Penh Diptych: Wet Season

Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season

Corfu

Displacement

Fortified

Epistle

•

Old Wives' Tales on Which I Was Fed

Solitude Study

Zuihitsu

Alike, Yet Not Quite

Lunar New Year, 1988

Metamorphosis

Naturalization

Lineage

Chinatown Diptych

•

Origin Story

Captivity

Private Property

Invisible Relations

Bildungsroman

Visual Orders

Borderless

No Animal

Melancholia

Inwardly

Square Cells

Tending

Exit, Eve

•

Hardwired

The Hunt

Zazen

To Be a Good Buddhist Is Ensnarement

Margins

Déjà Vu

Letters to Du Fu

Exile

A Slow Way

Ongoing

Long Nights

Notes