Wendy Xu’s Ottoline Prize-winning second collection, Phrasis, deeply disturbs the foundation of sensory experience. The book’s title, taken from Ancient Greek, translates to “manner of expression.” In interrogating both how we perceive and the systems into which we organize perception, the deftly wrought poems of Phrasis challenge the reader’s consumption and creation of “meaning.” There is a central tension between visual perception and language’s system of meaning that dominates Phrasis: “My source text was unresponsive and so varying / methods, slashed it pink instead.”

The book’s opening poem asserts “The poem vandalizing my original face, so let it work / ever against my body.” Immediately, the notion of expression is refigured not as an abstract concept, but as a visceral experience that works through and upon the human subject. It is no surprise with a book that is fiercely attentive to language and to the systems of meaning-making that there is sharp, even vicious attention to the artifice of the poem. This attention figures language as a made thing, and points the reader to ask who has constructed this system. Poetry is not exempt from Xu’s distrust of meaning-making, with language itself figured as the threat of erasure, as in “Recovery:” “The war was a syntactical / construction.”

This overarching distrust of perception is anchored to the central, recurring notion of surface, as displayed in the opening lines of “Some People”: “I had a theory, it flung its scent over / every shadow surface.” This idea of surface (of both the self and body) as a key site of the ideological conflicts Xu explores repeats often, as in “The Window Rehearses”: “I perform well / my surface for you.” This idea of surface extends beyond the bodily subject’s point of connection with the physical world, to explore how the interface with the surfaces upon which systems of perception play upon. The motif of television recurs throughout Phrasis, often insidious, and almost vampiric—draining the agency of a subject. Such attention to the media is both implicitly and explicitly politicized, as in “Task Force” and the following poem, “Sunday.” “Task Force” opens:

Moved all the way here to watch
television alone, swallowed by the grim

news grinning.

The poem then alludes to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and pushes back to the question of representation:

In the photo we still get perfectly centered

Longview the idiot’s
consumption guide

“Sunday,” the following poem, is a complementary piece, moving away from the political specifics to both global and personal abstract (a deft zooming that is a hallmark of Xu’s work):

I got right with myself, you know?
The disaster abroad had so much money
in the bank, popularized dissent spreading

warm red, remove yourself
from the screen if you can, maybe

Yet, Xu does not simply bemoan the modern world’s media and its mass-produced meaning-making. Rather, Phrasis bears down on the impetuses that shape perception and its representations.

“Phrasis,” a long poem in fragments that functions as the collection’s lynchpin, puts pressure on the act of representation as a gesture, and the perception that proceeds that movement. “Phrasis” moves through delicate turns of art making, very much invested in both colour and the hands that put colour to canvas. In this way, “Phrasis” is a lens through which to read the collection at large, and further gives the sense, woven throughout the collection, that colour itself is a coded expression for Xu. “Phrasis,” in particular, is formally resonant of Josef Albers’ Interactions of Colour, in which the colour theorist carefully juxtaposes colours to test their interplay, never over-layering, and leaving space in order for these tensions to reverberate. However, neither colour nor canvas are an intellectual neutral in “Phrasis,” but a surface upon which the tension between being a seeing subject and a seen object, particularly as a gendered subject, is brought into focus: “How a woman says do not only paint me as your / public pleases.”

The intense scrutiny of visual perception of Phrasis is reflected in the book’s own visual presentation and organization. Sectioned into four movements demarcated by short fragments titled only with an asterisk, these structural markers create a formal tension—are these poems a fragmentary whole, or self-contained signifiers? – that is furthered by the book’s grey pages for these breaks. Xu, whether in the long meditative poems such as “Phrasis” or in the minute details of book design, keeps pulling the reader back to question the relationship between what is seen and what is spoken. “Phrasis,” the central long poem in fragments, similarly employs subtle form and visual markers to invoke this tension. Each fragment takes its own page, beginning under a thick, black line to suggest the sense of the poems as descriptive labels, or, that the poem is “below” or related to a missing piece in a fashion reminiscent of Jenny Boully’s The Body.

Similarly, there is a deep attention to the book’s paratextual material. Often, epigraphs function as something of a thoughtful accessory to a collection, a sparkling addition to a carefully crafted outfit. But, in Phrasis, Xu’s duelling epigraphs provide a foundational means to read these poems. The first, from Emerson: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” The second is from John Wieners: “No circles / but that two parallels do cross.” These epigraphs immediately present the tension of visual sense and of remaking reality in perception, creating a tension that Phrasis continues to interrogate.

In one sense, Phrasis is a metanarrative inquiry into the limits of representations. Neither language, nor visual art, nor mass media is exempt from Xu’s piercing attention. But Xu pushes this questioning further, not simply interested in forms of meaning making, but the hands that shape those forms. The responsibility of representation, and the ethics of representational art that Phrasis insistently pushes to question are not only pertinent within contemporary poetry’s tired reprisals of “What should poetry do?” debates, but are crucial in today’s political climate that is increasingly reckless in its rhetoric.