“In You Are Not Dead, Wendy Xu breaks all the old rules that have never done us any favors anyway. She writes beautifully, noticing who we are, and letting us see ourselves with a little more humanity, a little more humor, a little more humility. I’m happy to have read this book.” —James Tate
“There’s a wild and wondrous poet plundering-through our lives, collecting the oddest and most significant things, turning our thoughts toward things we couldn’t have known before she turned us toward them. You Are Not Dead is precisely how this book can get you to feel and that is an almost other-worldly power. The poet who imagines and builds these poems is irresistible.” —Dara Wier
“That fluctuating space between the temporary and the infinite is an erogenous zone made all the more enticing when articulated so eloquently. ‘We have a lifespan and O how we live it out.’ Wendy Xu’ s poems posit for us a future, a presence, a body resistant to the ravages of time. Mortality is a far planet. Here in Xu’s work, we are passionately, and gratefully, alive.” —D. A. Powell
Wendy Xu is the author of You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013) and two chapbooks: The Hero Poems (H_NGM_N) and I Was Not Even Born (Coconut Books, 2013), a collaboration with Nick Sturm. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Columbia Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2013, and elsewhere. She co-edits and publishes iO: A Journal of New American Poetry / iO Books, and is the recipient of a 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.
