If you put on all of the coyotes, if you put on the sand as it flies beneath your incredible, little paws, if the sadness tries to put you on but you say, “No!” and wrestle the sadness to the ground, then you should put Wendy Xu’s You Are Not Dead on your bookshelf.

Xu’s first collection of poems knows what it's not—not a pointy snowflake blowing around over the perfect river, not dead. In this lyric inventory of surreal happenstance, Xu champions Nan Shepard’s concept of attention as devotion—a devotion to the minutiae of being alive, to the mundane suffering and ordinary joy that accompany living. She reveals that to pay attention is really to care—to give something a little dirt, a little light. 

Xu reads the world like it's printed in small caps—if you look close enough, everything is announcing itself, shouting at you. Yes, YOU. But, also: you.

“Look,” Xu instructs, holding her hand-binoculars up to my face—

someone right now is a nervous wreck, biking
against the dark ribbon of a highway like some kind
of quiet disaster

Look—

there’s a dog
with a missing leg licking the face
of another dog.

She points to my own hand-binoculars, resting in fists at my sides. “Oh yeah,” I say, when I’ve forgotten what it means to be present. Which is most often the reason I return to this book—

When I think my best games are behind me, and I’m already training for the next season.

When I notice that, in my carelessness, I've almost crushed a baby garter snake underfoot by the creek. When we both startle like I’ve walked in on an embarrassing scene in a public restroom. When many aphids confuse my mouth for a multi-level parking garage while I’m running, and I’m upset because they’re in my mouth, and they’re upset because they’re in my mouth, and I remember that I am alive and that they also might still be and spit them out onto the asphalt to try to save us all. 

What do I bring back
in my careless hands to show you?

What Xu brings back to us is an offering of the imagined world as a bridge, as a ballroom of collective and relational knowing. She admits that, here, when you make a lengthy drive across Iowa, what you find is the other end of Iowa. And, here, you put some sand in a jar and wait for it to mean. 

In You Are Not Dead, Xu is our riverboat guide to being alive—motoring us through wonder and skepticism with the vibrating, potential energy of the lyric assuring us it’s worth the risk (even though, at times, she’s just as stumped as the rest of us). After all, “some horses wade into the dangerous ocean because what else / is more important to see?”

If you jimmy the handle a little bit, if you stop thinking you’re less real than you are, if you believe in a future where everything is hypothetical except joy, then the giant land snail really is your friend. 

The way Xu orients herself to the world is staked on mutual recognition. A kind of love. When my friend and teacher dies, I take her poem and a single birthday candle to the creek. The poem goes to pieces in my hand, and the candle won’t light. Across the field, a mule watches me fumble with my matches, my head down. He knows my secret ritual is elegy. Patient, he waits for me to look, to meet his gaze. When we lock eyes, it feels like nodding. I let the paper melt, mumble something like “thank you.” 

I can never repay the generosity Xu offers a reader on the page. And Xu doesn’t ask me to. She only offers in hopes that anyone reading will pay forward what she gives.

It’s not just through mere observation that Xu ushers us into her world—careful observation rides a tandem bike with a kind of earnest assertion. When someone I love puts her hand on my chest and says, “Oh. I just remembered that you could die,” what she’s really saying is, “You are not dead.” 

And what luck. Because both of us are sure to die. 

Xu insists that we go at it alone, but, also, that going at it alone is a joint endeavor, a team sport. Here is the hypothetical. Here is your football. 

Here is your beloved. 

Here are those that run the plays with you. 

Here is the un-televised apocalypse. 

Here come my friends to help
me make the intimidating forest a stack
of sturdy logs.

Xu reminds us that in the event of a sudden drop in cabin pressure, a tiny party hat will deploy from the ceiling compartment. She reminds us that the event of a drop in pressure is still an event, an occasion. 

A lot can go wrong
if you sleep or think, but the trees go on waving
their broken little hands.

Xu reminds us that you have to secure your own tiny party hat before assisting others. 

Before cupping their faces. Before you start to cry.