Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire

by Wendy Xu

Moving freely between essay, close-reading, ekphrasis, memoir, travelogue, lecture notes, poetry, and even monologue, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds presents a series of “thinking-throughs” of formally innovative and politically oriented poets pushing the boundaries of what poetry can hold. Tracing a personal family history of immigration amidst larger concerns of diaspora, “unsayability,” and absence, Wendy Xu reads the work of poets including Layli Long Soldier, Inger Christensen, Ocean Vuong, Liu Xia, giovanni singleton, Bei Dao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and others. She explores existential and pedagogical questions in poetry from the point of view of a reader and a teacher. Why write? and why invite the paradoxes of a documentary approach into that writing? 

Not an overview or primer, least of all the final word, this free-ranging exploration of contemporary poetry considers larger questions of belonging, diaspora, the violence of language, the allure of the past, genre, witness, and form. It returns to memorable touchstone texts in the author’s life with renewed curiosity about their inner workings. Essays move with restless curiosity across topics, bringing them into conversation with poetry, from considering depictions of Christ in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, to the ecstatic illegible texts of Henri Michaux, discomfiting likenesses of agoraphobia and political imprisonment, and the epistolary trouble of fan-mail. Xu is drawn to poetry works of radical hybridity alongside personal experiences of formal intensity, as an immigrant daughter, a parentified child, an occasional agoraphobe, and a writer. Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds is a tour of poetic influences and the futures they’ve made possible.

194 pages, Paperback

Published October 6, 2025

About the author

Wendy Xu is a poet, editor, and professor, most recently the author of The Past (Wesleyan, 2021), and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review.

Her debut collection You Are Not Dead (2013), was named by Poets & Writers Magazine as one of the year’s Top 10 debuts. Xu was awarded the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry in 2011, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2014, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Tin House, Poetry, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, and widely elsewhere.

Born in Shandong, China, she holds an MFA from the Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She has been on creative writing faculty at the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Columbia University, New York University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Writing (Poetry) at The New School in New York City.