Xing - Softcover

Kuan, Debora

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0983368619 ISBN 13: 9780983368618

Publisher: Saturnalia Books, 2011

Synopsis

XING is about fraught crossings: East versus West, doubt versus belief, conformity versus individuality, the external world versus the internal one. These haunting, startling poems re-cast the world as we think we know it into playfully offbeat and idiosyncratic new molds. Using an array of voices--an answering machine, a Sixties sanitation worker, a post-war refugee, a marionette, and the head and body of a mannequin, to name just a few--Kuan reinvents the speaker's voice as an entity that is unfixed, fragmented, peripatetic, and endlessly pleasurable to hear.

DEBORA KUAN holds degrees from Princeton University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has received a Fulbright creative writing scholarship (Taiwan), University of Iowa Graduate Merit Fellowship, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference scholarship, Santa Fe Art Institute writer's residency, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. She has also written about contemporary art for Artforum, Art in America, Paper Monument, and other publications.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Debora Kuan's Xing is novelistic in its scope.  From "Articles of Faith" to "How to Make Bells," with numerous parabolic twists and turns, Xing unmasks at times the almost unsayable.  This is a beautiful, necessary, veracious voice assaying the vagaries of contemporary life and culture illuminated by flashes of history.    
 -Yusef Komunyakaa
This is a work of stunning crossings and double-crossings, crystalline opacities and ambiguous precisions.  It's quite unlike anything I've read:  A dizzying blend of drama, fractured narrative, real or invented family history, elegy, dream, religious meditation, erotic diary, critique of both Western nihilism and of any suggestion of Eastern mysticism--critique, indeed, of the possibility of thinking "East" and "West" in the global marketplace.  Kuan is a master of "the rhetoric of gamesmanship," bringing a naturalist's gaze to artificial surroundings, and a poet's vestigial desire for transcendence to a landscape in which "We came to understand/ our place as elsewhere, anywhere/ always just before or after."
-Mark Levine

Descriptive power, clear seeing, vivid, various material--Debora Kuan's poems have everything. She is a provocative and deeply rewarding poet.
-Jonathan Galassi

As Andre Breton's epigraph proposes that "everything beyond is here in this life," Debora Kuan's marvelous debut book of poems, Xing, contains multitudes in this singular collection where the quotidian is replete with unexpected crossings and surreal transformations.
-Arthur Sze

About the Author

DEBORA KUAN holds degrees from Princeton University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.  She has received a Fulbright creative writing scholarship (Taiwan), University of Iowa Graduate Merit Fellowship, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference scholarship, Santa Fe Art Institute writer's residency, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. She has also written about contemporary art forArtforum, Art in America, Paper Monument, and other publications.

About this edition

• Publisher: Saturnalia Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0983368619
• ISBN 13: 9780983368618
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96