Rootless -- Unspoiled fictions -- Phnom Penh Diptych : wet season -- Phnom Penh Diptych : dry season -- Corfu -- Displacement -- Fortified -- Epistle -- Old wives' tales on which I was fed -- Solitude study -- Zuihitsu -- Alike, yet not quite -- Lunar New Year, 1988 -- Metamorphosis -- Naturalization -- Lineage -- Chinatown Diptych -- Origin story -- Captivity -- Private property -- Invisible relations -- Bildungsroman -- Visual orders -- Borderless -- No animal -- Melancholia -- Inwardly -- Square cells -- Tending -- Exit, Eve -- Hardwired -- The hunt -- Zazen -- To be a good Buddhist is ensnarement -- Margins -- Déjà vu -- Letters to Du Fu -- Exile -- A slow way -- Ongoing -- Long nights -- Notes.

"Jenny Xie's award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. The sensual worlds here--colors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes--bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen. As Xie writes, "Me? I'm just here in my traveler's clothes, trying on each passing town for size." Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. Xie is a poet of extraordinary perception--both to the tangible world and to "all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach.""--Amazon.com.

Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, 2017.