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Wakening Between Worlds

Robert Day

Author: Xiaoly Li
112 pages, 2026
Literature | Poetry
ISBN: Paperback: 9781947175822

Xiaoly Li is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant (2022) recipient. Her poetry collection, Every Single Bird Rising (FutureCycle Press, April 2023), was a Zone 3 Press Book Award finalist. Her poetry collection, Wakening Between Worlds, will be published by Serving House Books, has been short-listed in 2024 Cinnamon Literature Award Adjudication. Its older version, Between the Sun and the Moon, was a finalist in the 2023 Diode Editions Book & Chapbook Contests and the Word Works’ 2024 Washington Prize. Her poetry is featured, or anthologized in Crab Orchard Review, Tampa Review, Salamander, Saranac Review, Spillway, Chautauqua, Rhino, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for: Best New Poets, five times a Pushcart Prize, four times Best of the Net. She lives in Massachusetts where her photography has been shown and sold in galleries in the Boston area. Her website: www.xiaolyli.art

 

The first time I read Wakening Between Worlds I sat with each poem, let it settle in me; I wanted to feel them, one at a time, before I thought them, something immediately apparent in the author’s approach, too. ‘I wrote my first poem / the first time I saw the ocean,’ writes Xiaoly Li, and thus does an intricate, dewed, singularly tender history begin. Through the turning of the natural world, this poet carefully, intentionally, walks us through a life—one with a questioning, persistent, openly admiring viewpoint that invites, via meditative offering, entry to her world.

Through single-stroke nature studies and a pantheon of intimate personae, this work reveals the author’s graceful connections between history and our own sense of self that we carry forward from turbulence and the human tendency to harm. ‘But what do I know of God’s beauty? Humans / prey on each other, and on many others, as well’ she writes. The Chinese diaspora is glorious in these pages. History and personae here vibrate with knowing, with understanding. But so too does the great love of a writer longing for a gentler way of being in the world, for a softer humanity. And maybe it’s out of our reach, ‘Why can’t I become who I aspire to be?’ she asks. In these poems Xiaoly Li answers that question, and in so doing, moves past it, standing bare under ‘ever-changing clouds.’”

              —Tennison Black, author of Survival Strategies, winner of the National Poetry Series 2022, and the AZ Book Award in poetry, 2024

 
 
 
 

Li’s exquisite Waking Between Worlds chronicles a life of regime change, childhood deprivation, forced familial separation, and immigration, and never refuses the comfort of the flora and fauna of the earth or of remembered and present beauty. Li’s inner compass is the love that holds us, living or dead, and her poems will replenish any reader again and again. 

              —Marcela Sulak, author of The Fault and the National Jewish Book Award Finalist, City of Skypapers

Wakening Between Worlds is the bravest of books. Xiaoly Li, born and raised in China, writes beautifully in a language and a sensibility not hers from birth. Her family history and the revolution underline the book, told with delicacy and without blame, the privation of her early years sleeping in a pigsty, scarcity of food they shared with the starving, even bean-cakes meant for pigs. We get palpable details, a bed the family used as a ping-pong table, street-vendors hawking red hawthorne ices in their Beijing neighborhood. The ancient poets visit her, inform her voice. Past and present intertwine throughout. At times she calls on forms: haiku, cinquain, shadorma. She tells us again and again of her awe of the natural world, observing the murder of one species by another, she recognizes we are all predators. Sometimes she imagines herself a bird, longing to fly, to escape the confines of her life. With the baby daughter she was forced to leave in China for several years, now an adult in the US, she is tender and tentative, careful not to burden her with love. And slowly her daughter returns to her. In the end, Xiaoly Li reclaims herself: Here I am/ O my little girl, my little self.

                  —Margot Wizansky, author of Random Music in a Small Galaxy

 

 

 

 

Xiaoly Li’s latest collection Wakening Between Worlds is a true discovery of identity. These poems narrate the poet’s heritage through magic and myth. It is in the unique ecological moments like the first time at the ocean where “each trace of us erased by waves” is another way the poet signifies bravery. Through persona, ars poetica, or just Li’s nuanced language, she brings us with her— to beauty, to pain where “every step a wound” breaks us as readers. Though, no matter where she takes us, we end each poem transcended.      

       —Alexis Ivy, author of Taking the Homeless Census

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