Juvenilia
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Ken Chen is the 2009 winner of the annual Yale Younger Poets competition. These poems of maturation chronicle the poet’s relationship with his immigrant family and his unknowing attempt to recapture the unity of youth through comically doomed love affairs that evaporate before they start. Hungrily eclectic, the wry and emotionally piercing poems in this collection steal the forms of the shooting script, blues song, novel, memoir, essay, logical disputation, aphorism—even classical Chinese poetry in translation. But as contest judge Louise Glück notes in her foreword, “The miracle of this book is the degree to which Ken Chen manages to be both exhilaratingly modern (anti-catharsis, anti-epiphany) while at the same time never losing his attachment to voice, and the implicit claims of voice: these are poems of intense feeling. . . . Like only the best poets, Ken Chen makes with his voice a new category.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest Yale Younger Poet writes about his Chinese-American heritage; he draws on classic Chinese poets, such as Wang Wei and Li Yu. Yet his verse and prose stand at the farthest possible remove from the memoirlike poems, and the poems of first-person identity, that have characterized so much recent verse about U.S. immigrant life. Instead, Chen is experimental in the best and broadest sense of the term: each new page brings an experiment in self-presentation, in sentence, syntax, or (long) line. Prose poems digress into semantic analysis ( Love Is Like Tautology in the Same Way Like Is Like Tautology ); open-field verse resembles now an alienated, impersonal short story, now a page from an anguished diary: He studies the ceiling for hours before he sleeps for the ceiling is ours./ He wore the bedroom ceiling as his eyelid. Self-consciousness (about travel, about voice ) does not take him away from his sense of himself: rather, it becomes him, as when he begins: The first sentence of this poem is not about you./ In this respect, it is unlike the last sentence and my heart. Chen's parents appear as characters in the anti-novel, anti-memoir, first-person sequence. The New York-based Chen who runs the Asian American Writers' Workshop deserves attention for his daring invention, for the heretofore unknown hybrids throughout his work.
