A book of essay, close-reading, Ekphrasis, memory, travelogue, lecture notes, imaginary writings, poetry, monologue, and fragments~~~
About belonging, diaspora, the violence of language, the allure of the past, genre, witness, form, ecstatic texts, hybridity, the past, the future, and experiences of intensity on and off the page~~~
Oct 6, 2025, Poets on Poetry series @uofmpress 🫀💧🧠
🌿〰It’s pub day for The Past!! A sad and searching and curious book, one that I hope speaks to you. For a while I did all my talking in its pages, it’s full of my belief and disbelief equally, my hope for a form to hold “the past itself,” ultimately too elegant to exist 🌿〰
@weslpress publishes my absolute favorite books, thank you Suzanna and Jackie and Stephanie for believing in The Past, thank you Wendy and Brandon for kindest words that really humble me〰
🚨 And hot tip you get 30% off the book today!! Lots of virtual readings coming up. I won’t be able to sign your book, but I’ll wave at you with melancholy and gratitude. Both real as real. Info and everything through 🔗 in bio. You know.
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🪷Three Petals🪷
Choreographer/Director: Alvin Tran
Song: Katie @katieeesh
Poet: Wendy Xu
Commissioned by @deptof.love
So supremely fun and generative to reunite with @alvinisfree for Three Petals!!! A conversation (years now, really!) that became a poem-text that became a movement piece/performance love letter staged by Alvin and Katie, without whom the text has no life and no breath and no revolutionary feeling! Three Petals (in poem form) is for me about bodies, families, structures of hard and soft, yielding and constricting, and the promise of a future beyond the bi-(nary), to use Alvin’s word, the tri-(nary) serves better, no? The Chinese “huadian” is a decorous forehead adornment for women but here allows an embodied negotiation of “3” as a formal idea…”three barter[ing] for the life of the whole”
You can read the full poem-text at deptof.love/Letter_1 and 🔗 to full video in bio
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a new essay, it’s not too long, on writing and mothering and fear, a public annotation of my own book and my own mother and my own obsession with Why Write? Why Do This At All? 🫣🌸 🔗 in bio, thank you to @morgan_vo for such a thoughtful and moving invitation some time ago to share this and to extend my own thinking in the pages of the @poetry_project newsletter. I’m trying to psych myself up to send this to my mother now 🥲
new poem from the new work in New York Review with most gigantic thank yous to @personfromporlock ✨✨ the issue also has a great new poem by @p.g.gizzi that I’m so happy to share space with! 💚 link to full poem in bio
spoke w/ Jesse Nathan for @mcswys about the past, The Past, the Present, and the feelings in between, 🔗 in bio for a bit, there are thoughts (not by me) on my oeuvre and tour de…force, supposedly! 😳🙏🏼🌿🌿🌿
Weirdly and constantly thinking about this poem, my own old poem, these days, bounded by screens so much, still wanting to learn to say Yes, to not burn away ❤️🔥👩🏻💻 (thx Banango Street for publishing it so many years ago and making space for me who was a 👶🏻🍼)
Six views of THE PAST, now available for pre-order (🔗 in bio), arriving soon September 7th, thank you @weslpress 🌼
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Cover collage by #JoeBrainard, supreme writer of past and pasts
Earlier this spring MoMA @themuseumofmodernart sent me CARDBOARD LANDSCAPES by the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri and I took a deep dive into Ghirri’s playful, surreal, and extremely moving world
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I wrote “Love Poem for You Beyond” (just the beginning here) inside Ghirri’s photos of interlocking realities with all the seams showing, something I loved about his work, the way it revels in depiction abutting depiction, sky chafing against depiction of sky. I crossed the 1 year anniversary of Covid stay-at-home orders while working on this project, a very strange experience of heightened longing that I wrote through
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Thanks to @alexhalberstadt for working with me and publishing the poem in #MoMAMagazine alongside some of the specific reference photos I worked with from Ghirri’s book. Thanks for reading me if you do. Link in bio.
So happy to be part of @triple_canopy ’s new RESENTMENT issue, for which I wrote this long poem on my immigration, language, Tiananmen Square, and familial piety. I can still remember the way my parents would often wrap up their resentment in aphorism or ritual, never airing it for fear of seeming ungrateful to the white people around them. The way I repressed my resentment for a long time too. Maybe I want to unearth it a little bit now—see what it has to teach me. Some excerpts here, link in bio duh 🙏🏽✨
![Three PetalsChoreographer/Director: Alvin TranSong: Katie @katieeeshPoet: Wendy XuCommissioned by @deptof.loveSo supremely fun and generative to reunite with @alvinisfree for Three Petals!!! A conversation (years now, really!) that became a poem-text that became a movement piece/performance love letter staged by Alvin and Katie, without whom the text has no life and no breath and no revolutionary feeling! Three Petals (in poem form) is for me about bodies, families, structures of hard and soft, yielding and constricting, and the promise of a future beyond the bi-(nary), to use Alvin’s word, the tri-(nary) serves better, no? The Chinese “huadian” is a decorous forehead adornment for women but here allows an embodied negotiation of “3” as a formal idea…”three barter[ing] for the life of the whole”You can read the full poem-text at deptof.love/Letter_1 and to full video in bio](https://sp1.picnob.com/p/pt_6834403949281110221252_0_0a7988968d88b010b20bdc4e6aa77e07.jpg?o=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&h=ed95234ba88bd0fc50ce42cafb0c4f5b)
