I’m interested in teasing out the moral complications in travel, but I’m not claiming any moral authority on the subject. Traveling, and the estrange… - Jenny Xie

Reading is migratory, an act of transport, from one life to another, one mind to another. Just like geographic travel, reading involves estrangement that comes with the process of dislocating from a familiar context. I gather energy from this kind of movement, this estranging and unsettling, and I welcome it precisely because it’s conducive to examination, interrogation, reordering. Travel, imaginative or physical, can sharpen perception and force a measuring of distance and difference.

I try to distance myself from systems of literary production and strains of thought that place primacy on publishing and publishing quickly. Ironically, one way to keep myself going is to surrender completely to the fear that I won’t write again, and try to access some recessed zone where any need or ambition to write poems, or to write for others’ eyes, falls away. Once I’ve been emptied of those needs, I find I can allow myself to be filled once more. Reading invigorating work, putting myself in the presence of formidable voices and minds, or submerging myself in slow films usually helps, too.

I gravitate toward language that radiates a certain energy for me.