Part protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part
internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part
arte povera for the wretched of the earth, Lynn Xu's book-length poem,
And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, holds fast
to our fragile utopias. Under the auspice of birth and the contingency
of this beginning, time opens: ecstatic, melancholy, and defiant, the
voices of the poem flicker between life and death, gorgeous and
gruesome, visionary and intimate.