The Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize recognizes the best published work in the English language written by an author aged 39 or under. All literary genres are eligible, so short stories and poetry sit alongside novels on this year’s longlist of 12 titles:

• Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black
• Michael Donkor, Hold
• Clare Fisher, How the Light Gets In
• Zoe Gilbert, Folk
• Emma Glass, Peach
• Guy Gunaratne, In Our Mad and Furious City
• Louisa Hall, Trinity
• Sarah Perry, Melmoth
• Sally Rooney, Normal People 
• Richard Scott, Soho
• Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, House of Stone
• Jenny Xie, Eye Level

For this stop on the official blog tour, I’m featuring the debut poetry collection Eye Level by Jenny Xie (winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets), which was published by Graywolf Press in 2018 and was a National Book Award finalist in the USA last year. Xie, who was born in Hefei, China and grew up in New Jersey, now teaches at New York University. Her poems focus on the sense of displacement that goes hand in hand with immigration or just everyday travel, and on familial and evolutionary inheritance.

The opening sequence of poems is set in Vietnam, Cambodia and Corfu, with heat and rain as common experiences that also enter into the imagery: “See, counting’s hard in half-sleep, and the rain pulls a sheet // over the sugar palms and their untroubled leaves” and “The riled heat reaches the river shoal before it reaches the dark.” The tragic and the trivial get mixed up in ordinary sightseeing:

The tourists curate vacation stories,

days summed up in a few lines.

 

Killing fields tour, Sambo the elephant

in clotted street traffic,

dusky-complexioned children hesitant in their approach.

Seeing and being seen are a primary concern, with the “eye” of the title deliberately echoing the “I” that narrates most of the poems. I actually wondered if there was a bit too much first person in the book, which always complicates the question of whether the narrator equals the poet. One tends to assume that the story of a father going to study in the USA and the wife following, giving up her work as a doctor for a dining hall job, is autobiographical. The same goes for the experiences in “Naturalization” and “Exile.”

The metaphors Xie uses for places are particularly striking, often likening a city/country to a garment or a person’s appearance: “Seeing the collars of this city open / I wish for higher meaning and its histrionics to cease,” “The new country is ill fitting, lined / with cheap polyester, soiled at the sleeves,” and “Here’s to this new country: / bald and without center.”

The poet contemplates what she has absorbed from her family line and upbringing, and remembers the sting of feeling left behind when a romance ends:

I thought I owned my worries, but here I was only pulled along by the needle

of genetics, by my mother’s tendency to pry at openings in her life.

 

Love’s laws are simple. The leaving take the lead.

The left-for takes a knife to the knots of narrative.

Those last two lines are a good example of the collection’s reliance on alliteration, which, along with repetition, is used much more often than end rhymes and internal or slant rhymes. Speaking of which, this was my favorite pair of lines:

Slant rhyme of current thinking

and past thinking.

Meanwhile, my single favorite poem was “Hardwired,” about the tendency to dwell on the negative:

Though I didn’t always connect with Xie’s style – it can be slightly detached and formal in a way that is almost at odds with the fairly personal subject matter, and there were some pronouncements that seemed to me not as profound as they intended to be (it may well be that her work would be best read aloud) – there were occasional lines and images that pulled me up short and made me think, Yes, she gets it. What it’s like to be from one place but live in another; what it’s like to be fond but also fearful of the ways in which you resemble your parents. I expect this to be a strong contender for the Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist, which will be announced on April 2nd. The winner is then announced on May 16th.

My thanks to Midas PR for the free copy for review.