Hard Love Province

June 16, 2014
To read Chin (Rhapsody in Plain Yellow) in her fourth collection is to set foot in a land where death and loss are omnipresent and possess their own native tongue. “Any moment now,” she writes, “The diasporas will form a new dialect,” and they do. Bookended by poems for a lost lover, Chin’s collection is a high-octane elegy that mourns the beloved even as it implicates the mixed-up world the beloved has left behind. Chin transforms the haiku, no longer confining it to reflections on natural beauty, but turning it into an obliterator of identity: “Gaze at the charred hills,/ the woebegone kiosks,/ we are all God’s hussies.” This collection emphasizes stark borders between life and death only to strip them down: “My cousin calls him Allah my sister calls him Jesus/ ... I call him call him on his cell phone/ But he does not answer.” Put another way, “You could be a rich corpse or a poor corpse.” Yet, these poems are not consigned to the reality of the grave as destination. Chin shouts into the void, almost frantic, insisting that we “write pretty poems pretty poems pretty poems/ Mask stale pogroms with a sweet whiff of oblivion.”

May 1, 2014

Chin's fourth collection (after Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen) includes chants, elegies, love poems, a haiku sequence, and something she calls a sonnetnese. Several poems were inspired by and offer homage to the work of other poets, including Adrienne Rich and Gwendolyn Brooks. Chin brings a rich sensuality to her poems, which frequently embody a unique shape and style; she often uses caesuras (pauses), which are usually effective, adding breath to the poems. In the chants and elegies, Chin writes beautiful lines incorporating music and interesting sounds: "O sunlit bourree of doves/ O moonlit cantata of red ribbon/ Let's drum girls let's ululate let's praise." Yet in the same poem the rhymes can seem forced, even simplistic: "Today she is laughing with Julio/ Tonight she is dancing with Coolio." Some poems switch moods often. After talking lightly about the governor being a terminator, "Black President" veers off into unexpected directions--"An exo-cannibal eats her enemies/ An indo-cannibal eats her friends"--then closes with another abrupt shift in thought--"Blood on the altar Blood on the lamb/ Blood in the chalice/ Not symbolic but fresh." VERDICT Chin brings a sense of experimentation to her poems, which work best when she combines elements of nature into the urban sphere. Yet at times the poet's vocabulary seems dull and the lines flaccid: "You baked me a cake and it's not even my birthday/ I ate a slice politely though it's wormy and stale." Ultimately a mixed bag, uneven but intriguing. [Extra spaces between words are not errors.--Ed.]--Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2014
A surfer-dude appears in a prose poem about girls who grow horns during the Han Dynasty. Similarly, time periods and images collide in (Dueling Quatrains) when Entertainment Weekly wants to interview Emily Dickinson. Chin's (Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, 2009) freewheeling, intense new collection pays unorthodox homage to poets of the past. W. H. Auden's touchstone line in his elegy to W. B Yeats, For poetry makes nothing happen, suddenly appears in a poem entitled Kalifornia (A portrait of the poet, / wearing a girdle of severed heads). And in Study Hall, Deterritorialized, Chin updates Gwendolyn Brooks' We Real Cool with intelligence and swagger. Chin also invokes Wang Wei, an eighth-century Chinese poet, and The Book of Changes (I Ching). At times sensual, erotic, and even unabashedly crude, Chin explores ideas of emotional and physical heritage. The book's most profound moments occur in odes to the poet's former lover, a Beautiful Boyfriend, who attempts to prepare his beloved for his impending death by disconnecting his cell phone and assuring her that he will tweet from the other side. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)