A REVIEW OF XIAOLY LI’S EVERY SINGLE BIRD RISING
Every Single Bird Rising, Xiaoly Li. Future Cycle Press, 2023. 90 pages. $15.95
by Alexis Ivy
The Poet’s Counter Revolution: a Review of Xiaoly Li’s Every Single Bird Rising
Every Single Bird Rising is this poet’s second language. Xiaoly Li’s debut collection is both weightless and heavy, depending on the line your eyes end up lingering on. What I love about this collection is this text presents some challenges as a writer: I cannot tell you who I am without telling you about the Cultural Revolution. How do I write about this moment in history without sounding like a textbook, how do I share my experience with the reader having no knowledge of this time in history. The poems need to speak to the reader with the right amount of context. Li does this heartbreakingly without missing a beat, especially in her persona poem, “My Mother’s Voice”:
A little farther away from the sun,
we’d be frozen to sculpture,
like the day when
my betrayal was announced
I was Rightist,
enemy of the Republic.
My blood lost its warmth;
muscles couldn’t move the bones.
Gasping, I uttered no words.
These poems make me want to research and study more about this era that I haven’t spent enough time uncovering. Xiaoly Li carefully chooses moments of “in a remote mountain village” where she composes the beauty of nature against her thrown into reality of the Down to the Countryside Movement. We begin here, in those hills where “Reeducation” has taken place: “we set a trap using a wok in front of the chicken coop”, the poet shows us how she must learn a new layer of creativity during these biographical moments of her adolescence. This group of poems begin the book, letting the reader enter a history hard to swallow and for most, a complete culture shock. The poet translates these hard hard moments back into poetry. Li isn’t only showing us the struggle in her remarkable images, she is transcending the struggle into poetry. This is a difficult task that Li has mastered fluency in.
Li again shares another raw moment in the incredible dialogue in “Under the Harsh Light” which is a stylistic poem that needs to be uttered more as a way of overcoming the bullying of our lives. Li writes the poems no one wants to write, the ones that say someone said something cruel to me and I am willing to repeat it. This approach to writing is bold and courageous. Li again transcends a disturbing traumatic moment into poetry by finding the right language to find responses to hurtful insults. “Leggings would fit you better”, and how the poet grew from this time into an “expanding tree, with thundering radiance.”
The first chapter has a recurring image of the tree throughout, symbolizing the growth of the poet. The chapter ends with the poem, “As a Political Prisoner”, with the first line, “you must become a tree… even after you fall as a log”, this poem being the wisdom she has learned during her time as a political prisoner forced to relocate and be a laborer in a rural setting. The reader carries this fact into the later poems of the collection, knowing the poet is coming from a place of trauma, and into a place of freedom.
The next chapter, These Shades of Green moves us to America, where the poet creates a new life for herself, and her family. She encounters friendship, seasons, and the search for the “American Dream”. She shows America in such a creative way in the poem, “The Mandarin Duck in Central Park”:
No one shouts: Go back to your own country!
No one asks: Do your countrymen have smaller dicks?
In these lines, Li is opening up about her own fears she has of the country she just moved to. These fears are monumental and also probably relatable to the immigrant experience she articulates with humor and spice. It is no doubt that Li also becomes a poet later in this chapter. Reading each Ars poetica, especially the poem in which she learned to be a poet, “Poetry in a Second Language”. This poem is a persona poem from the voice of her mentor speaking about the poet’s poems (her own poem)! Yes, it is very much a tongue twister! Love the line: “This is your counter-revolution. You are safe now.”
Evolve, the third chapter, the poems become more of a meditation. It is the beginnings of the pandemic of 2020. These poems are a real homage to nature and nurture. Li’s voice is strong and full of mantras on how to create a safe space during these unprecedented times. In the poem, “Far and Near”:
The world trembles as we cut down forests,
boil the wild with our hot pot.
Now sickness sneaks into our cities,
our breathing.
And so bright and big is the moon,
I want to touch it with my sanitized hands.
And again in “We Go out When the Sun Comes Out”, the poet is confident in her newfound world she sustains “we breakfast and lunch on our back porch, / like Parisians at an outdoor café.” Finding joy in the darkness of the pandemic is uplifting, and she carries her reader with her, forcing us to be just as strong during these troubling times. This poem transitions us to the last chapter.
After the heat and violence of what poems have come before, it is a breathing exercise reading the last chapter, Aubade. The theme is acceptance. the first three chapters present a path that had to be taken. The reader sees how the poet tends to her path. In this last chapter, the poet accepts the storyline of all her relationships and reaches for nature to guide her strength and movement into the life she has. Each affirmation is another way the poet gives blessings and shares what she knows, as well as what she does not know. Mid-chapter she attests: “I don’t believe / there is only one way / to trace a spiral.” This stanza is such a strong metaphor for strength, and the way one copes with the harm the world throws at you.
This collection is full of loss and gain. The poet teaches us history, a history she survived and voices her experience without judgement, only with images. Feelings, yes. Li never just loses, she always gains, whether it is the chance to see a bird flying across her sky or the choice to turn her back on the sun. This book is both political, personal, and far from sentimental. It is a book to reread, take slowly. Sometimes I felt I was reading a description of a photo, such vivid details and then there was an epiphany mid-line. Every Single Bird Rising is poetic artistry, veracity and heart.
Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. She is co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). A recent resident of the Vermont Studio Center, she lives in her hometown Boston, working as an advocate for the homeless, and teaching in the PoemWorks community.