Description
Book SynopsisIn this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family – the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes – all from Asian American, immigrant and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this refreshingly candid and entertainingly provocative collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one’s own path in identity, life and love. Foreword by Jericho Brown.
Trade ReviewChen Chen refuses to be boxed in or nailed down. He is a poet of Whitman’s multitudes and of Langston Hughes’ blues, of Dickinson’s "so cold no fire can warm me" and of Michael Palmer’s comic interrogation. What unifies the brilliance of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is a voice desperate to believe that within every one of life’s sadnesses there is also hope, meaning, and – if we are willing to laugh at ourselves – humor. This is a book I wish existed when I first began reading poetry. Chen is a poet I’ll be reading for the rest of my life. -- Jericho Brown
Chen Chen is already one of my favorite poets ever. Funny, absurd, bitter, surreal, always surprising, and deeply in love with this flawed world. I’m in love with this book. -- Sherman Alexie
The radioactive spider that bit Chen Chen (isn’t that how first books get made?) gave him powers both demonic and divine. The bite transmitted vision, worry, want, memory of China, America’s grief, and People magazine, as well as a radical queer critique of the normative. What a gift that bite was – linguistic, erotic, politic and impolitic, idiosyncratic and emphatic. What a blessing and burden to write out of the manifold possibilities of that contact. -- Bruce Smith
Table of ContentsForeword by Jericho Brown Self-Portrait as So Much Potential 1 I’m not a religious person but In the Hospital Summer Was Forever Race to the Tree West of Schenectady Self-Portrait With & Without First Light How I Became Sagacious Elegy Please take off your shoes before entering do not disturb 2 Song with a Lyric from Allen Ginsberg Talented Human Beings To the Guanacos at the Syracuse Zoo Elegy for My Sadness Ode to My Envy Irreducible Sociality Antarctica Second Thoughts on a Winter Afternoon In the City The Cuckoo Cry Didier et Zizou Kafka’s Axe & Michael’s Vest Poem In Search of the Least Abandoned Constellation If I should die tomorrow, please note that I will miss the particular Frog-Hopping Gravestones Sorrow Song with Optimus Prime 3 for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me In This Economy Night falls like a button Things Stuck in Other Things Where They Don’t Belong Song of the Night’s Gift Chapter VIII 68 Nature Poem When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities For I Will Consider My Boyfriend Jeffrey babel & juice Song of the Anti-Sisyphus Talking to God About Heaven from the Bed of a Heathen Elegy to Be Exhaled at Dusk Spell to Find Family Little Song Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls Poplar Street Notes Acknowledgments About the Author
