To Compare

A bracing and variegated debut, Xuela Zhang’s To Compare inhabits the fraught condition of living in and through translation in the age of globalization, social media, and the Chinese-American neo-Cold War. In To Compare, Zhang navigates the quagmire of transnational life, where one is always both here and away. “Has language/passed you by/like a curvy city/or shielded/and isolated you,/an illuminated vehicle/against the flooding/tenors of light?” Zhang writes in To Compare, reflecting on the nature of translation—both linguistic and otherwise— as a way of life. Disjunctive, alluring, To Compare poetically represents our contemporary age.