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

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

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

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

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Overview

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

WINNER OF THE THOM GUNN AWARD FOR GAY POETRY

WINNER OF THE GLCA NEW WRITERS AWARD

WINNER OF THE A. POULIN, JR. POETRY PRIZE

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2017 SELECTION: POETRY & LITERATURE

ON NPR BOOKS'S LIST OF "POETRY TO PAY ATTENTION TO: 2017'S BEST VERSE"

In 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 collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love.

In the Hospital

My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend.
But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, short
skeleton, tall mocha. Typical Tuesday.
My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend.
Everyone wanted to be soft cooing sympathies. Very reasonable
pigeons. No one had the time & our solution to it
was to buy shinier watches. We were enamored with
what our wrists could declare. My mother was in the hospital
& I didn't want to be her friend. Typical son. Tall latte, short tale,
bad plot, great wifi in the atypical café. My mother was in the hospital
& she didn't want to be her friend. She wanted to be the family
grocery list. Low-fat yogurt, firm tofu. She didn't trust my father
to be it. You always forget something, she said, even when
I do the list for you. Even then.


Chen Chen was born in Xiamen, China, and grew up in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in two chapbooks and in such publications as Poetry, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry. The recipient of the 2016 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, he has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation, Lambda Literary, and in 2015, he was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships. He earned his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. Chen lives in Lubbock, Texas, with his partner, Jeff Gilbert, and their pug dog, Rupert Giles.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781942683339
Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date: 04/11/2017
Series: A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America
Pages: 96
Sales rank: 359,779
Product dimensions: 6.80(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Chen Chen was born in Xiamen, China, and grew up in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in two chapbooks and in such publications as Poetry, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry. The recipient of the 2016 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, he has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation, Lambda Literary, and in 2015, he was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships. He earned his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. Chen lives in Lubbock, Texas, with his partner, Jeff Gilbert, and their pug dog, Rupert Giles.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard Universityand the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), was named one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. Brown earned a PhD from the Universityof Houston, an MFA from the Universityof New Orleans, and a BA from Dillard University. He is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Emory Universityin Atlanta.

Table of Contents

Foreword 8

Self-Portrait as So Much Potential 13

1

I'm not a religious person but 17

In the Hospital 18

Summer Was Forever 19

Race to the Tree 20

West of Schenectady 24

Self-Portrait With & Without 25

First Light 26

How I Became Sagacious 28

Elegy 29

Please take off your shoes before entering do not disturb 30

2

Song with a Lyric from Allen Ginsberg 33

Talented Human Beings 34

To the Guanacos at the Syracuse Zoo 35

Elegy for My Sadness 37

Ode to My Envy 39

Irreducible Sociality 40

Antarctica 42

Second Thoughts on a Winter Afternoon 44

In the City 45

The Cuckoo Cry 47

Didier et Zizou 48

Kafka's Axe & Michael's Vest 50

Poem 52

In Search of the Least Abandoned Constellation 55

If I should die tomorrow, please note that I will miss the particular 56

Frog-Hopping Gravestones 57

Sorrow Song with Optimus Prime 58

3

For i will do/undo what was done/undone to me 61

In This Economy 62

Night falls like a button 64

Things Stuck in Other Things Where They Don't Belong 65

Song of the Night's Gift 67

Chapter VIII 68

Nature Poem 69

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities 70

For I Will Consider My Boyfriend Jeffrey 72

Babel & juice 74

Song of the Anti-Sisyphus 75

Talking to God About Heaven from the Bed of a Heathen 77

Elegy to Be Exhaled at Dusk 78

Spell to Find Family 80

Little Song 82

Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls 83

Poplar Street 85

Notes 88

Acknowledgments 89

About the Author 92

Colophon 96

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher


"Chen Chen refuses to be boxed in or nailed down. He is a poet of Whitman’s multitudes and of Langston Hughes's 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

"I so deeply love this poet’s imagination where old shoes might walk back up the steps of a house, where one speaker pledges ‘allegiance to the already fallen snow’ and another says ‘Let’s put our briefcases on our heads, in the sudden rain, // & continue meeting as if we’ve just been given our names.’ In precise and gorgeous language, Chen Chen shows us that the world is strange and bright with ardor. He reminds us of the miracle of the sensual and sensory. This is a book I will return to whenever I forget what a poem can do, whenever I am in need of song or hope. If a peony wrote poems in a human language, I think that these would be his poems. If the rain wrote poems… I mean: this is an important work by an astonishing and vital voice."

—Aracelis Girmay

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