In conversation with Emily Skillings; 12:10 – 1:00 pm, Morristown & Morris Township Library
Wendy Xu
Wendy Xu is a poet and writer, most recently the author of The Past and Phrasis, named one of the “10 Best Poetry Books of 2017” by the New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, Conjunctions, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, and widely elsewhere. A new book, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire, will be published Oct 2025. Xu is an assistant professor of writing at The New School in NYC.
MFOB featured book: Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire
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?
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. 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.
