Quill & Parchment: You Are Not Dead

You Are Not Dead
by Wendy Xu
84 pages/ 67 poems
Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Date: 1st edition (March 6, 2013)
ISBN-10: 0986025720
ISBN-13: 978-0986025723
Price: $15.95
To Order: You Are Not Dead

Advance Praise:

"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 signif-
icant 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
otherworldly 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

About the Author:

Wendy Xu is the author of You Are Not Dead, published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2013,
and two chapbooks: The Hero Poems (H_NGM_N) and I Was Not Even Born (Coconut Books, 2013), a collab-
orative work. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2013, Best of
the Net, Gulf Coast, Verse Daily, Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor and
publisher of iO: A Journal of New American Poetry / iO Books.

From the Book:

IN JUNE LIKE WE SAID BUT
I FELL OUT OF LOVE
by Wendy Xu

Once I went to a costume party for the end
of the world where I was a meteor and my friend
a blue-jay who scattered feathers all
over the room dancing. After she was just
a pale molted dress we sat there drinking
tequila on the roof and I was one year older.
She wore a mask for whatever reason covered in thousands
of tiny, blue crystals. My meteor dress had started to pull
apart at the craters. We talked about how everybody just wants
to be happy without ever really trying. She said Yes but
let’s pretend we’re different, shaking a small fist at nothing
in particular. So we stayed up there in the dark for a while
thinking about what to think.

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