When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

Starred review from March 27, 2017
Chen balances the politics surrounding shame and desire with hearty doses of joy, humor, and whimsy in his vibrant debut collection. To consider the titular act of growing up—to recognize what potential could mean—Chen must make sense of his past to imagine a better future in his poems. “I thought I could/ tell this story, give it a way out of itself,” he writes. To this end he recounts a personal history in which he playfully addresses deeply serious issues, particularly a longing to defy the fate prescribed to him by family members or others’ cultural ideas of normalcy: “I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be.” As a gay, Asian-American poet, Chen casts his poems as both a refusal of the shame of sexuality and of centering whiteness or treating it as a highly desirable trait. Readers encounter sharp, delightful turns between poems, as Chen shifts from elegy to ode and back again. He also toys with language, as when he mulls the plight of someone’s ill mother: “all I can think of is how sick’s/ also a word for ‘cool.’ ” Moving between whimsy and sobriety, Chen both exhibits and defies vulnerability—an acute reminder that there are countless further possibilities.

Starred review from April 15, 2017

Visually vivid, erotic and intimate, at times bitingly funny, and refreshingly world-observant, Chen's poems are steeped in the pain of being other as both Asian American and gay. He's excellent at relating the confusion of childhood, recalling "Mom & Dad's/ idiot faces, yelling at me" as they confront his sexuality and grappling with the consequences of his heritage. The standout poem "First Light" enumerates many different, often outré ways Chen envisions having come to this country, embodying the kind of imagination it takes to adapt to a new culture. Throughout, there's ratcheted-up emotion yet an amazing command of language: "I carried in my snake mouth a boxful/ of carnal autobiographies" says the world. VERDICT An A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize winner; expansive work for expansive audiences.

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