"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."
—Tennison Black, author of Survival Strategies, winner of the National Poetry Series 2022, and the AZ Book Award in poetry, 2024
"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. 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
"Xiaoly 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."
—Marcela Sulak, author of The Fault and the National Jewish Book Award Finalist, City of Skypapers
"Wakening Between Worlds is the bravest of books...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..."
—Margot Wizansky, author of Random Music in a Small Galaxy
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.
