WINNER OF THE TUPELO PRESS BERKSHIRE PRIZe
In poems of memory, psychogeography, desire, and self-mythologization, then telling be the antidote is Xiao Yue Shan’s assertion against the malignancy of forceful silences.
By illuminating what has been left untold, these writings present the vivid landscape of a mind layering itself over the world, thinking and speaking its way through a myriad of places, objects, and visions. From rooms overlooking Tokyo rivers to Shanghai streets in the thrall of nighttime, Shan throws light on a nation’s quieted crevices, on the distances between the carnal and the eternal, and most pivotally, on the ability of language to elucidate fact with imagination.
“In then telling be the antidote, Xiao Yue Shan writes: “Sometimes/we spoke in a language so heavy that we passed/the words around in our hands.” In this beautiful book of poems, Shan’s language floats in the liminal space between countries, between history, between language. Shan’s poems explore themes of home, gender, politics, all the while exploring the threshold of the long line. These poems are lush and airy at once, uncertain and certain, powerful and gentle. Shan’s voice is unique and her gifts palpable, and we’re so lucky to have her words passed onto our hands.”
VICTORIA CHANG
“To be modern is to thrive among sudden juxtapositions and to witness deep within the unsettling interstices. In then telling be the antidote, juxtapositions—of past and present, of pastoral and urban, of the bitter lessons of the classics and the untaught lessons of the coming days—arrive and insist with awesome velocity. And yet Xiao Yue Shan tempers that velocity with apparently effortless, almost serene control. There is an uncommon mastery at work in these poems.”
DONALD REVELL
“Xiao Yue Shan’s then telling be the antidote wrestles with longing and desire like no other. Shan crafts dynamic and ever-evolving portraits of time, place, and beloveds, and the attention paid to all is proof of the poet’s loving eye. ‘[S]uch is the heaven of images,’ Shan writes, which is an equally apt descriptor of the collection itself. Each poem brings to life moment, memory, history, language, and rebellion—asking the question of what it means to write in the face of or despite all the forces that press upon us. The collection is testament and witness to Shan’s power as a poet.”
WENDY CHEN
“I likened this collection, after an initial reading, to a canvas by Kandinsky, where broad strokes of vivid color and delicate, lyrical passages are very often underscored by an unease, a kind of muted protest. It’s a combination which proves immediately effective, and which generates real admiration for a poet confident in her art—a poet spilling ideas to the page with invention and purpose.”
AS REVIEWED BY ROBERT DUNSDON IN THE COLORADO REVIEW
“Exile is the starting point of Shan’s collection, an origin from which she spins possible futures from the infinite variety of the present participle. Hers is a poetics of finding, or as she writes in the same poem, ‘it is so wonderful to not be found / but to be finding,’ to reject the object-state of the lost and to engage instead as the subject whose recursive narrative finds a way home.”
AS REVIEWED BY ASA DRAKE IN POETRY NORTHWEST
“then telling be the antidote is a catalog of possibilities for the self, and the ways we might reimagine the relationship between time and diaspora in service of more visionary futures.”
AS REVIEWED BY VIKA MUJUMDAR IN FULL STOP MAG
“There’s a surety and calmness of voice, even in the disruptions of immigration, fluid uncertainly, serious poverty. But there’s also urgency—lives are at stake, death is a reality. These poems explore evacuation paths filled with bodies, starvation, martial law, writers who disappeared or were censored by the state. The stakes are high. Shan is the calm voice of the emergency system telling you to not run, but GO. LIVE.”
AS REVIEWED BY DANIELLE HANSON IN COMPULSIVE READER
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