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 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.

DEBORA KUAN holds degrees from Princeton University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has received a Fulbright creative writing scholarship (Taiwan), University of Iowa Graduate Merit Fellowship, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference scholarship, Santa Fe Art Institute writer's residency, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. She has also written about contemporary art for Artforum, Art in America, Paper Monument, and other publications.