Lynn Xu’s Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight

“Here reposes the reverie-inducing freedom of Rilke and Proust, where you get to say ‘dreaming’ twice, or a thousand times, and even ‘et cetera’ twice, in case you forgot to fill in the blank with your own lyrical, rapture-adjacent images the first time.”

To read any of the books published by the singular Wave Books is to go on a carnival ride past Catherine Wheels of words. These productions, in their aggregate, represent an utterly clear, if eclectic, vision of innovation, which I summarize as “semiotics is fun.” Further, their editions are exquisite, with high-quality paper and an eye to design. One cannot imagine them as eBooks. The signature “plain” black-and-white soft covers are elegant, unpredictable in the size and placement of the typography they bear, titles sometimes wrapping around the spine and back cover. Inside, each poet’s phrases practice a wild discipline, sometimes one word to a page, other times, lines ricocheting now against the left margin, now the right, the next one somewhere in between. Or with the shape of each poem describing parabolas and other figures one learned how to graph with sines and cosines in calculus. The aptly named Wave is a case of poet and press naturally gravitating toward one another, in a marriage of perfect convenience. As in a theater production, every detail seems to have been gone over one hundred times to create synchrony. These spiritual descendants of Mallarmé and Baudelaire are animated by a sense of serious play, in touch with the historical avant-garde yet equally unfettered by any slavish indebtedness to the rebels they revere.

As I perused five of their publications that lay before me, one in particular beckoned, for reasons only understood somatically. And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight. I picked it up. I asked myself why more poetry book titles do not feature the word cantilever. Nine initial pages are taken up with each successive word of the title, presenting itself with indolent luxury. The pages had a pleasing smell, as if emanating a light cologne. Then the work proper began, in oversized letters, like an edition for someone with weak eyesight.

“Rippling in the ceosops

foreskin of wind

still surrounded by blood

poverty

and the uneven caresses

lying at the bottom

dreaming dreaming

days of complete idleness

urinating

without rejection

transparent

at ***** in the afternoon

now rising

now setting

a windbreak of gum trees

et cetera

the edge of time

et cetera”

Here reposes the reverie-inducing freedom of Rilke and Proust, where you get to say “dreaming” twice, or a thousand times, and even “et cetera” twice, in case you forgot to fill in the blank with your own lyrical, rapture-adjacent images the first time. And yet “blood/poverty” (are those two separate things, or only one?) governs this book. We quickly succeed to a lengthy sequence in which the speaker seems the cosmic consciousness of a fetal presence taking its sweet time issuing into the world since, after all, the womb is the world. The immediate next pages consist of short phrases undergirded by their equivalents in Chinese, white ink adrift on a dramatic sea of black background, each again meriting its own page: “She is floating/and I float with her/in the middle of nothing/in no shadow/The unconscious…/What is it?/A voluptuousness…?”