Wendy Xu

Everyone’s worried about the apocalypse, but not everyone has a sweet, best friend who insists the apocalypse is nothing to worry about. In Wendy Xu’s debut collection, You Are Not Dead, there are a plenty of everyday things to fear—moving to a new city only to forget old friends, dying in a house fire, the “actual untelevised apocalypse”—but “nothing is actually wrong with us ever,” the speaker insists, though she takes “a quiet kind / of panic to the river” (10, 60, 7). You will be charmed by this witty, non-committal prophet who keeps on noticing, with an unusual gratitude, that meaning is not dead: “I know my hands fold / on their own. I know falling / to my knees still means something. / That a basin of cool water still answers the moon” (15). Creatures keep on living, too, and they’re wondrous—those friends who talk about craving waffles, that majestic African Prairie Buck, the tree she’s planted “knowing / it’s fine without me” (18, 8, 25). You Are Not Dead tells us it’s okay to surrender our need for control, proposing that “one way to be amazed is to be / less amazing and then pay / attention” (18). Wendy Xu writes a realistic hope and humility into our every little anxious thought, illuminating the natural grace that still exists among us. What an overlooked, exceptional truth: we will one day die, but we are not dead yet.

To knock over the first domino in a domino trail is to experience a prolonged ending, but to knock over one domino at a time, to have your own finger so involved in a falling, is to stretch an anticipation out to forever, and that is exactly what this book does; the poems turn on a whim (or, more likely, a whimsy) and with each turn, you must reach out and restart the domino, the trail that isn’t actually a trail, but really a series of lilly pads that you must hop across, never knowing if the next one will give, and that maybe you will fall into all that mucky muck and be forced to recall that you are no cartoon after all.

The best inscription I got at AWP this year included touches of the sincere, the complimentary, and the ironic. Wendy Xu’s book, You Are Not Dead, was just published by Cleveland State University Press, and I happened to be there when she was signing books. “I hope you like these poems!” she has written first: humbleness, classy sincerity. And then, for the unexpected twist: “Your cardigan is changing my life.