Jenny Xie, _Eye Level_

 I CAME ACROSS a couple of poems by Jenny Xie recently...in the New Yorker, I think, and somewhere else...which inspired me to read this, which has been sitting on the shelf since it won the Walt Whitman Award (now known as the "First Book Award") back in 2017. 

It reads like a debut collection in the early going, with poems based on travel impressions ("Phnom Penh Diptych,""Corfu") and childhood memories of China ("Lunar New Year, 1988"), very visual and elliptical. The poems towards the latter half of the book seem written later--at least, they don't seem written with the intention of dazzling the rest of the workshop. They are more introspective, more candid, based on longer experience...more mature, in a way, but in the way suggested by Dylan's line, "I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now." 

The first half of the book makes some canny transferred epithets, as when the description of a  garment becomes a description of being an immigrant ("The new country is ill fitting, lined / with cheap polyester, soiled at the sleeves") or words that might describe a mother's hair are applied to her emotions ("Her sorrow has thickness and a certain sheen"). They are consistently skillful, but sometimes feel a bit designed or calculated.

The poems of the latter half seem not be trying so hard but to be getting more work done. Take a line like, "The simplicity of it is difficult" (from "A Slow Way"). Boom! as the mic hits the floor.  Or Xie's pointing out that in the multiplicity of our selves, one of the selves will decide that it is boss: 

One self prunes violently
at all the others
thinking she's the gardener.

I know I have a self that thinks it's the gardener, and I bet you do too. 

Or the lines in which the book's title occurs: 

She had trained herself to look for answers at eye level,
but they were lower, they were changing all the time.

Xie has published another collection of poems since this one, as well as a novel. If I am right that the poems in the latter part of Eye Level were written late than those in the first part, the second collection will be worth getting a hold of.