Coming of Age

Jenny Xie

First published in Salt Hill 32 (2014).

When the gates opened, some of us remained still. Others walked off, with no one to call after them. What a sight it was. You plant an alphabet in your sleep and wake to acres and acres of radios. Something long shuttered cracked. Our faces no longer guileless. We felt time segmenting like lichens, a shade of ourselves quickening. In front of our eyes, the wind whipped its subjects forth in tune with some strange choreography. You could walk into a name for yourself. You could walk into a fear of being robbed of your life.

​Jenny Xie is the author of EYE LEVEL (Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Her chapbook, NOWHERE TO ARRIVE (Northwestern University Press, 2017), received the Drinking Gourd Prize. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Kundiman, and New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2020, she was awarded the Vilcek Prize in Creative Promise.