Two Menus

by Rachel DeWoskin

Overview

There are two menus in a Beijing restaurant, Rachel DeWoskin writes in the title poem, “the first of excess, / second, scarcity.” DeWoskin invites us into moments shaped by dualities, into spaces bordered by the language of her family (English) and that of her new country (Chinese), as well as the liminal spaces between youth and adulthood, safety and danger, humor and sorrow. This collection works by building and demolishing boundaries and binaries, sliding between their edges in movements that take us from the familiar to the strange and put us face-to-face with our assumptions and confusions. Through these complex and interwoven poems, we see how a self is never singular. Rather, it is made up of shifting—and sometimes colliding—parts. DeWoskin crosses back and forth, across languages and nations, between the divided parts in each of us, tracing overlaps and divergences. The limits and triumphs of translation, the slipperiness of relationships, and movements through land and language rise and fall together.

The poems in Two Menus offer insights into the layers of what it means to be human, to reconcile living as multiple selves. DeWoskin dives into the uncertain spaces, showing us how a life lived between walls is murky, strange, and immensely human. These poems ask us how to communicate across the boundaries that threaten to divide us, to measure and close the distance between who we are, were, and want to be. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226682174
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	03/13/2020
Series:	Phoenix Poets
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Rachel DeWoskin is the author of five critically acclaimed novels: Banshee; Someday We Will Fly; Blind; Big Girl Small; and Repeat After Me; and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing; along with the poetry collection Two Menus, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Her essays, poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Sunday Times Magazine of London, Condé Nast Traveler, Asian Wall Street Journal, Far Eastern Economic Review, Agni, Ploughshares, New Delta Review, New Orleans Review, Seneca Review, and numerous journals and anthologies. She is on the core creative writing faculty at the University of Chicago and affiliated faculty in Jewish and East Asian Studies. DeWoskin serves on the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action (WDA).

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

December 1, 1972

Place of Birth:

Kyoto, Japan

Education:

A.B., Columbia College, Columbia University, 1994; M.A., Boston University, 2000

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
The Blind Massage Parlor
The Caretaker’s Daughter
Love Poem from South China
Neighborhood Kids
Two Menus
Articulation
Chinese Highway
American Highway
Four Years of Winter
Public Relations, Beijing
Extreme Sports
Honeymoon
Foreigners
Seafood
Housekeeping
Night Swimming
Sex Poem
Girls at 1001 Nights
Belligerence
Straight Up
Joint Venture
I was dancing when I heard
Your Wife
Wake Up
Reticence School
My Grandfather’s Wives
Cardiac Breakfast
Prison Questions
Stampede
Driving Lesson, 1984
Dialysis
Report Cards of the Not Quite Dead
Without
Horse Fair
You Wrote Your Own Obituary
Dear Geryon
Dear Alice
Parting at Changgan
Power of the Powerless
From Your Mama at First
Next Up
Imagining
Once Conscious
My Mother Comes Back to Me
Too
 

Editorial Reviews

Smart, fierce and formally brilliant, the poems in Two Menus are wonderfully energetic and alive. Spinning between love and loss, childhood and womanhood, Chinese and English, DeWoskin creates a blaze of language that stuns with precision, wisdom and joy.

Kirun Kapur

"These story-like poems, accessible to even the finickiest nonreaders of poetry, travel fast and span a lifetime of a woman as recounted by an accidental sex-symbol of the Chinese soap opera 'Foreign Babes in Beijing,' later turned author, wife, mother, and university professor. . . . Bitterness and Happiness is a restaurant in Beijing that offers two menus, one with a selection of excess, the second scarcity. We find those contradictions in this collection—pain/joy; heartbreak/fusion; language/silence—all here to read in this remarkable debut, a veritable smorgasbord to appeal in equal measure to both the poetry finicky and the poem gourmand. Bon appétit."

 

Coachella Review

DeWoskin’s sophisticated, clever poetry, vacillating between soft and sonic, manages to break into the parts of the human story that so often seem inaccessible, or at least indescribable.

Newcity Lit

‘The restaurant in Beijing called Bitterness / and Happiness has two menus,’ recalls the insatiable speaker of this bountiful debut. Combining a novelist’s narrative command with a poet’s faith in the mystical felicities of rhyme, DeWoskin chronicles a life lived in voracious pursuit of all aspects of earthly experience. Whether rock climbing in China, river rafting in California, nursing her child, grieving another's child, visiting a family member in prison, or a dying friend in the hospital, she savors the living pith of each passing moment, and transmutes it into nourishing song. ‘Here’s how / we stay human even torched by sorrow,’ she writes, singing down mortal dread. ‘Spackled, rageful, wracked, we sparkle.’

Suzanne Buffam

"DeWoskin takes us from grief to romance in Two Menus, a debut of stunning clarity and formal dexterity. The subtleties of this book are balanced by the world each poem means to hold. DeWoskin is a poet of things, of the image, and of the narratives that attention to image allows. This is a beautiful book."

Jericho Brown

DeWoskin’s range includes fresh new visions of Chinese language and culture, which lead to new ways of understanding an American life; fresh new ways of using rhyme, happily melding sonnets and hip-hop; fresh, uncowed understandings of the historic past, for example Cleopatra: this first book is fresh in more than one sense of the word and a great, illuminating pleasure.

Robert Pinsky

DeWoskin’s spectacular debut Two Menus offers us a lyrical banquet of tempting contradiction. In the title poem, we learn of “[t]he restaurant in Beijing called Bitterness / and Happiness”, which has “two menus: the first of excess, / second, scarcity.” Through DeWoskin’s own uncanny language, both larger-than-life and daringly precise, we read to rediscover the boundaries that both divide and join our worlds: us/them, love/disgust, safety/danger, sanity/madness, language/silence. How can one life be expected to take in all that there is before us? How can it all make sense? And yet, with lucid description, and with abiding love and wit, each poem in this audacious book asks for more—even when it hurts.

Frederick Speers

“‘The restaurant in Beijing called Bitterness / and Happiness has two menus,’ recalls the insatiable speaker of this bountiful debut. Combining a novelist’s narrative command with a poet’s faith in the mystical felicities of rhyme, DeWoskin chronicles a life lived in voracious pursuit of all aspects of earthly experience. Whether rock climbing in China, river rafting in California, nursing her child, grieving another's child, visiting a family member in prison, or a dying friend in the hospital, she savors the living pith of each passing moment, and transmutes it into nourishing song. ‘Here’s how / we stay human even torched by sorrow,’ she writes, singing down mortal dread. ‘Spackled, rageful, wracked, we sparkle.’

author of A Pillow Book Suzanne Buffam

"DeWoskin takes us from grief to romance in Two Menus, a debut of stunning clarity and formal dexterity. The subtleties of this book are balanced by the world each poem means to hold. DeWoskin is a poet of things, of the image, and of the narratives that attention to image allows. This is a beautiful book."

author of The Tradition Jericho Brown

‘The restaurant in Beijing called Bitterness / and Happiness has two menus,’ recalls the insatiable speaker of this bountiful debut. Combining a novelist’s narrative command with a poet’s faith in the mystical felicities of rhyme, DeWoskin chronicles a life lived in voracious pursuit of all aspects of earthly experience. Whether rock climbing in China, river rafting in California, nursing her child, grieving another's child, visiting a family member in prison, or a dying friend in the hospital, she savors the living pith of each passing moment, and transmutes it into nourishing song. ‘Here’s how / we stay human even torched by sorrow,’ she writes, singing down mortal dread. ‘Spackled, rageful, wracked, we sparkle.’

author of A Pillow Book Suzanne Bauffam