The three poems included here represent the turning point of Xi Chuan’s developing style, where the modernist lyric reaches, and begins to pierce through, its upper limits, the way “plains push out from the edge of the city / mountains lift up at the edge of the plains.” Later, he would describe his focus on the paradox, or oxymoron, as one poetic reaction to China’s political and economic realities; here, those realities are represented by a power outage and an awareness of our becoming history — and Borges’s annotated “aporia of history” — in which, like Borges, we all become librarians “preserving the order of the universe and books.”