[4] During her visit, she would begin writing the poems that would appear in The Rupture Tense; she would also encounter Li Zhensheng's photographs in a library at New York University Shanghai and "devoured it in one sitting."

[5] The Rupture Tense, Xie's second poetry collection, tackles her identity as an Asian American by partly interrogating the Cultural Revolution and other aspects of modern Chinese history, with poems that interface with photographs by Li, while also reflecting on her own estrangement and linguistic alienation as someone who grew up in the United States.

[10] Similarly, The Times Literary Supplement said Xie's writing evaded known pitfalls in some Chinese American writing—trauma porn, self-Orientalizing, among others—"through self-interrogation, historical awareness, and a poetic rendering of cultural theory.

"[14] Qiu Xiaolong told The New York Times that "In poetics, [Xie] chooses a uniquely working form, controlled language, to mold these inhuman experiences into an organic whole.

"[5] Washington Square Review concluded "Amidst retention and erasure, Xie’s collection configures its own capacity for considering all manner of dissolutions, the trajectories endured by the body, the space created by the twists of language, and the eternity held within the collapsing measure of the tense.