
The Rupture Tense
Poems
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $7.73
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Jenny Xie
-
By:
-
Jenny Xie
About this listen
Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory—historical, collective, personal—stains and erodes. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged.
The Rupture Tense begins with poems provoked by the photography of Li Zhensheng, whose negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and concludes with an aching elegy for the poet’s grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end of the Revolution. This extraordinary collection records the aftershocks and long distances between those years and the present, echoing out toward the ongoing past and a trembling future.
©2022 Jenny Xie (P)2023 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
-
The Hurting Kind
- By: Ada Limón
- Narrated by: Ada Limón
- Length: 1 hr and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
-
-
The Beauty of her insights
- By Tom on 07-30-24
By: Ada Limón
-
Punks
- New & Selected Poems
- By: John Keene
- Narrated by: John Keene
- Length: 3 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, Punks: New Selected Poems is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, Punks weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love.
-
-
A Well-Deserved National Book Award Winner
- By Andre on 08-22-23
By: John Keene
-
Frank
- Sonnets
- By: Diane Seuss
- Narrated by: Diane Seuss
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare.
-
-
The real real
- By Amazon Customer on 04-10-24
By: Diane Seuss
-
Balladz
- By: Sharon Olds
- Narrated by: Sharon Olds
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is Sharon's gift to us that in her richly detailed exposure of her sorrows she can still elegize songbirds, her true kin, and write that heaven comes here in life, not after it.
-
-
Intimate!
- By Profree 123 on 11-11-22
By: Sharon Olds
-
Golden Ax
- Penguin Poets
- By: Rio Cortez
- Narrated by: Rio Cortez
- Length: 1 hr and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience, comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family's history as "Afropioneers" in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures.
-
-
Absolutely wonderful!
- By ML on 09-27-22
By: Rio Cortez
-
Customs
- Poems
- By: Solmaz Sharif
- Narrated by: Solmaz Sharif
- Length: 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through.
By: Solmaz Sharif
-
The Hurting Kind
- By: Ada Limón
- Narrated by: Ada Limón
- Length: 1 hr and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
-
-
The Beauty of her insights
- By Tom on 07-30-24
By: Ada Limón
-
Punks
- New & Selected Poems
- By: John Keene
- Narrated by: John Keene
- Length: 3 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, Punks: New Selected Poems is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, Punks weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love.
-
-
A Well-Deserved National Book Award Winner
- By Andre on 08-22-23
By: John Keene
-
Frank
- Sonnets
- By: Diane Seuss
- Narrated by: Diane Seuss
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare.
-
-
The real real
- By Amazon Customer on 04-10-24
By: Diane Seuss
-
Balladz
- By: Sharon Olds
- Narrated by: Sharon Olds
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is Sharon's gift to us that in her richly detailed exposure of her sorrows she can still elegize songbirds, her true kin, and write that heaven comes here in life, not after it.
-
-
Intimate!
- By Profree 123 on 11-11-22
By: Sharon Olds
-
Golden Ax
- Penguin Poets
- By: Rio Cortez
- Narrated by: Rio Cortez
- Length: 1 hr and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience, comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family's history as "Afropioneers" in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures.
-
-
Absolutely wonderful!
- By ML on 09-27-22
By: Rio Cortez
-
Customs
- Poems
- By: Solmaz Sharif
- Narrated by: Solmaz Sharif
- Length: 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through.
By: Solmaz Sharif
-
Nature Poem
- By: Tommy Pico
- Narrated by: Tommy Pico
- Length: 1 hr and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nature Poem follows Teebs - a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet - who can't bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He'd slap a tree across the face. He'd rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he'd rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole.
-
-
Even better read by the author
- By gwyndolin on 10-24-21
By: Tommy Pico
-
Judas Goat
- Poems
- By: Gabrielle Bates
- Narrated by: Gabrielle Bates
- Length: 1 hr and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Gabrielle Bates's electric debut collection Judas Goat plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book's eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the "forbidden felt language" of sexual and sacred love.
-
-
Unforgettable Images…and more
- By EB on 02-04-23
By: Gabrielle Bates
-
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
- By: Franny Choi
- Narrated by: Franny Choi
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.
-
-
Franny is a gem
- By Anonymous User on 01-24-23
By: Franny Choi
-
Voyage of the Sable Venus
- And Other Poems
- By: Robin Coste Lewis
- Narrated by: Robin Coste Lewis
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Robin Coste Lewis’ electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems considering the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. The central panel is the title poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus”, a riveting narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present - titles that feature or in some way comment on the Black female figure in Western art.
-
-
Stunning
- By LORETTA LIBBY ATKINS on 07-18-23
-
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
- Stories
- By: Aimee Bender
- Narrated by: Jorjeana Marie, Alex McKenna, Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips?
-
-
Lovely, Weird. Need More!
- By Erica Shanks on 03-05-24
By: Aimee Bender
-
Good Talk
- A Memoir in Conversations
- By: Mira Jacob
- Narrated by: Mira Jacob, Kivlighan de Montebello, full cast
- Length: 2 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A bold, wry, and intimate memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us.
-
-
Inspiring, funny, very good yet quick read
- By Maureen on 06-03-19
By: Mira Jacob
-
The Remains of the Day
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.
-
-
Beautiful and ever relevant
- By bbots on 07-04-20
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
-
Pale Colors in a Tall Field
- Poems
- By: Carl Phillips
- Narrated by: Carl Phillips
- Length: 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Carl Phillips' new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten.
By: Carl Phillips
-
Deaf Republic
- A Lyric Essay
- By: Ilya Kaminsky
- Narrated by: Ilya Kaminsky
- Length: 1 hr and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence.
-
-
Brilliant poems
- By Jen on 02-22-23
By: Ilya Kaminsky
-
Couplets
- A Love Story
- By: Maggie Millner
- Narrated by: Maggie Millner
- Length: 1 hr and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A woman lives an ordinary life in Brooklyn. She has a boyfriend. They share a cat. She writes poems in the prevailing style. She also has dreams: of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet. But the dreams are private, not real. One night, she meets another woman at a bar, and an escape hatch swings open in the floor of her life. She falls into a consuming affair—into queerness, polyamory, kink, power and loss, humiliation and freedom, and an enormous surge of desire that lets her leave herself behind.
By: Maggie Millner
-
Postcolonial Love Poem
- Poems
- By: Natalie Diaz
- Narrated by: Natalie Diaz
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Postcolonial Love Poem, the brilliant second collection from Natalie Diaz, holds in its pages the urgent appeal for all bodies―bodies of lovers, family, enemies, as well as of language and rivers and land―to be held dearly. In her lyrical landscape, Diaz tenderly prods the wounds inflicted by America onto its Indigenous peoples.
-
-
Divine and Duende
- By Amazon Customer on 11-17-23
By: Natalie Diaz
-
The Carrying
- Poems
- By: Ada Limón
- Narrated by: Ada Limón
- Length: 1 hr and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—“What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”—and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: “Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.” And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives.
-
-
The Calm, Serene Tone of Her Voice
- By Tom on 05-31-24
By: Ada Limón