There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife

“Reader, you are lucky to have the award-winning chapbook of JinJin Xu before you. These superb poems resonate with personal and cultural intimacy. JinJin Xu writes with the insight and skill of a veteran poet, a doyen, a griot. Her lines open and breathe on the page as they do in the mind and heart. There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife is inventive, linguistic, ambitious, tender, wise, brave. This fabulous chapbook may be a collector’s item someday.”

— Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

Descent

The work of Descent began in 2013, when I acquired a copy of my great-great-grandfather’s diary. Robert Wallace (“Bob”) Hubert was a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was my great-grandmother. As I transcribed the 225-page diary, I became interested in its omissions and decided to write into the gaps. Much of what I know comes to me via Bob Hubert himself—his diary, his military records, even his grades. Thus part of the work of Descent is to imagine the life of my great-great-grandmother Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. Descent is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images, and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present. Though the book took seven years to come into the world, the questions that drove me to begin the project in 2013 seem even more urgent now.