Xing

XING is about fraught crossings: East versus West, doubt versus belief, conformity versus individuality, the external world versus the internal one. These haunting, startling poems re-cast the world as we think we know it into playfully offbeat and idiosyncratic new molds. Using an array of idiosyncratic voices—an answering machine, a Sixties sanitation worker, a post-war refugee, a marionette, and the head and body of a mannequin, to name just a few—Kuan reinvents the speaker’s voice as an entity that is unfixed, fragmented, peripatetic, and endlessly pleasurable to hear.