The poems in Lynn Xu’s striking debut collection, Debts & Lessons, travel under the power of history’s illusory engine and echo its ululations of love, violence, and lament. Named after the first part of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, this book also finds its way across oceans and between languages, as the poet looks to the dead for guidance amid the abstractions of contemporary life. Xu pays her phantoms (and her readers) with the dream-currency of hallucinatory songs, which balance her finely-tuned ear against a world of awakenings.

LYNN XU was born in Shanghai. Her poems have appeared in 6x6, 1913, Best American Poetry 2008, Boston Review, Octopus, Poor Claudia, and others. A chapbook, June, was published by Corollary Press in 2006. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a William L. Magistretti Fellowship, she is currently the Jacob K. Javits Fellow at UC Berkeley, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. She holds an MFA from Brown University. With Robyn Schiff, Nick Twemlow, and husband Joshua Edwards, she coedits Canarium Books. Between Stuttgart and Marfa, she divides her time.