Xiaoly Li's Poetry Book Every Single Bird Rising is published by Future Cycle Press on April 3, 2023. Her second poetry book Wakening Between Worlds is published by Serving House Books on January 31, 2026. If you want author-signed copies, please contact us.

Every Single Bird Rising 

In her poignant debut collection, Xialoy Li moves with longing and soulful reflection between her childhood in China during the harsh years of the Cultural Revolution and her life in America. With admirable restraint and a syntax crafted in the spaces between two languages, she brings us to the edge of sorrow and then deftly deflects us and consoles us with lyrical tonal shifts, as in her heartbreaking poem “My First Day in America.” Recalling how her mother “told the nanny to hide / my baby, so that I would / not hesitate to leave,” she sees her face, in slow water, “twitched into a mosaic. / A leaf falls in, / blood red.” This is a brave poet who embraces her journey between two worlds by showing us what a wise and full heart is able to hold—whether eating stir-fired cat while dreaming of ripe figs in a Chinese reeducation camp; penning an elegy to Dr. Li Wenliang, whose Covid warnings were ignored; savoring her husband’s homemade sesame honey pie; or wondering if her departed grandfather might be able to heal her, too, as she tells us, slant, of a goldfinch that settles on a thistle flowerhead, picks “one piece . . . another . . . another . . . until / the air is full of floating silver seeds.” 

         —Wendy Drexler, author of Notes from the Column of Memory

Xiaoly Li’s Every Single Bird Rising is an evocative and well-crafted journey between places and times, from China and the Cultural Revolution to walks in Central Park to pandemic backyard birthday parties. With a deft command of image and language, Every Single Bird Rising asks questions that resonate long after one has turned the page: What is one’s purpose? How does that purpose interact with the larger world, with where we come from and where we end up, as time passes? As the collection explores possible answers to these questions in lush detail and poignant descriptions, we find the “mist melts the boundaries,” bringing what might at first seem disparate into resounding relief. Through loss and longing, the speaker of Every Single Bird Rising turns again and again to nature, finding grounding and connection, recognizing “particles / mirror each other / no matter / how far apart.” Generously and compassionately written, this beautiful book will stay with me forever. 

                  — Callista Buchen, Author of Look Look Look 

This extraordinary book moves between the present and the past filled with personal reflections on the immigrant experience and an historical perspective that includes Mao’s labor camps, the Red Guards, and the provincial poverty depicted in the poem “Reeducation”— we set up a trap using a wok / in front of the chicken coup. / A cat falls to our prayer for meat. Rich cultural strands are woven into the very DNA of this lyrical book filled with a reverence for life and the natural world: an influx of magnolia, peach flowers and rhododendron—the universe is breathing me. In the poem “Poetry in a Second Language,” the voice of her mentor: This is your counter-revolution / You are safe now—sets the tone for the subsequent poems that transform everything, even suffering, into curiosity and gorgeousness.

                 —Grey Held, author of WORKaDAY

Early in her impressive debut collection, Xiaoly Li asks, “Who can bear to look?” And in a resolute and direct voice she answers the call of that question’s burden. Li not only looks, but peers deeper and deeper into the pain and beauty of the worlds she straddles, the shifting times and places she has lived in and through, as she teases wisdom from unyielding memory. These poems carry the weight of history and testify about good and ill. I will not soon forget the stories she tells, nor the ways her poems work at “building a great wall / of tender hearts / to reduce the wind’s ruin.”

                    —Todd Davis, author of Coffin Honey and Native Species 

Reviews:  Elizabeth Sylvia, Barrelhouse 2023

                  Alexis Ivy, The Ocean State Review 2024

Wakening Between Worlds 

Xioaly 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

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 exquisit  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

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