Poetry. Asian American Studies. "Lynn Xu's DEBTS & LESSONS is a book of influences and emanations. Finding their namesake in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Xu's poems consider acts of goodness, kindness, and deliberation. Yet Xu's apprenticeship in the classical comes up against the absurd demonic bleakness of other lessons—those we find in Macbeth and hellish passages from Dante, Eliot, and Milton. Hers is a poetry of theodicy and, as she traces the features of her own face in the faces of the past, striking originality."—Susan Stewart

"Lynn Xu makes the poetic line a little theater where the belatedness of language is felt—and sometimes lulled into suspension. [She] is an expert at multiplying sites of resonance and ambiguity, of conjoining or confusing epochs and zones, braiding her lines into a 'wreath / in which time, unleaving did / Row back, backward its small current.' It did and it does."—Ben Lerner

Author City: MARFA, TX USA

Lynn Xu was born in Shanghai. Her poems have appeared in 6x6, 1913, Best American Poetry 2008, Boston Review, Octopus, Poor Claudia, and others. A chapbook, June, was published by Corollary Press in 2006. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a William L. Magistretti Fellowship, she is currently the Jacob K. Javits Fellow at UC Berkeley, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. She holds an MFA from Brown University. With Robyn Schiff, Nick Twemlow, and husband, Joshua Edwards, she coedits Canarium Books. Between Stuttgart and Marfa, she divides her time.

Reviews and Other Links
Publishers Weekly
interview by Anis Shivani @ The Huffington Post
Barbara Hoffert @ Library Journal