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Yale Series of Younger Poets
Juvenilia
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.�
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Hardcover
First published April 20, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
August 25, 2015
This book won the Yale Younger Poets prize annual literary award for 2010, which is a competition open to any American under forty years of age who has not previously published a volume of poetry.
Louise Glück offers a wordy, academic forward highlighting moments in Chen's collection which I found to be somewhat informative, but I'm sorry to say, also a bit dry.
Chen's poetry, however, was not dry. There are instances where Chen captures the Chinese American immigrant story through images of his mother, father, and other familial ties in poems such as "My Mother and My Father Decide My Future and How Could We Forget Wang Wei?" and "The Invisible Memoir." But his poetry is a lot more than just an exploration of past and heritage. Chen also delves into relationship touching on fidelity, longing, and break-ups with a modern, unique voice which was deeply emotional without being melodramatic:
She said to her husband, "Last night
my life was so quiet that my feelings were audible.
When the phone rang, I thought it was my heart."
There are also poems where you only get bits and pieces which create a fragmentary, scrapbook effect. Sometimes its hard to make out just what is happening or if anything is really happening. Perhaps the poems are reflections back into a memory that can only piece together a past that isn't entirely remembered.
I also felt Chen was very keen with portraying absences (where the characters in his poems don't speak or where something important is left unsaid). In this way, the reader is left to read between the lines:
"I like eating with him because he knows
my secret. Even though we do not
talk about my secret."
Overall, these poems are deeply engaging and unusual - exploring love, loss, family, and identity in a way that is rich, complex, and exploratory, yet gently profound and elegantly modern.
Louise Glück offers a wordy, academic forward highlighting moments in Chen's collection which I found to be somewhat informative, but I'm sorry to say, also a bit dry.
Chen's poetry, however, was not dry. There are instances where Chen captures the Chinese American immigrant story through images of his mother, father, and other familial ties in poems such as "My Mother and My Father Decide My Future and How Could We Forget Wang Wei?" and "The Invisible Memoir." But his poetry is a lot more than just an exploration of past and heritage. Chen also delves into relationship touching on fidelity, longing, and break-ups with a modern, unique voice which was deeply emotional without being melodramatic:
She said to her husband, "Last night
my life was so quiet that my feelings were audible.
When the phone rang, I thought it was my heart."
There are also poems where you only get bits and pieces which create a fragmentary, scrapbook effect. Sometimes its hard to make out just what is happening or if anything is really happening. Perhaps the poems are reflections back into a memory that can only piece together a past that isn't entirely remembered.
I also felt Chen was very keen with portraying absences (where the characters in his poems don't speak or where something important is left unsaid). In this way, the reader is left to read between the lines:
"I like eating with him because he knows
my secret. Even though we do not
talk about my secret."
Overall, these poems are deeply engaging and unusual - exploring love, loss, family, and identity in a way that is rich, complex, and exploratory, yet gently profound and elegantly modern.
August 20, 2010
pg 8: "When I was little, I thought that the water came out of the showerhead because it was crying. This is because I heard my mother crying and thought it was the showerhead."
pg. 34: "One can use a question mark for many things. For example: as a sicle for cutting people's hearts off."
pg. 45: "The wet lamplight tangles into wire. It will stitch your eyes closed."
pg. 34: "One can use a question mark for many things. For example: as a sicle for cutting people's hearts off."
pg. 45: "The wet lamplight tangles into wire. It will stitch your eyes closed."
March 19, 2023
ooohooohoo this was lots of fun
November 28, 2018
Honestly a little disappointed - I came here because of a particular poem that I read in an anthology ("yes, no, yes, the future, gone, happy, yes, no, yes, cut, you") and it was still my favorite Ken Chen poem. Still gonna keep an eye on the poet, though.
July 28, 2022
"My Mother and My Father Decide My Future and How Could We Forget Wang Wei?" / "The Year-Killer" / "The Mansions of the Moon" / "Yes, No, Yes, The Future, Gone, Happy, Yes, No, Yes, Cut, You" / "Adversarial"
September 26, 2018
it was chill.
June 13, 2022
??? !!! yeah
Read
August 19, 2011from "Long Distance Love--Can It Work?"
Deploy your heart past its range. That sound
is not the heart beating. It stammers.
The goal of love is to be unmastered.
This meat is still alive!
--
from "The Invisible Memoir"
Against authenticity. If the exotic is the sensuous enigma, no sensuousness. Zero lyricism of food, night markets, Chinese customs, nature. No use of the appositive, the clause that annotates a noun (e.g., "the clause that annotates a noun").
. . .
When translator Herbert Giles compares this "to the German notion that the spirit of the dead mother, coming back at night to suckle the child she has left behind, makes an impress on the bed alongside the baby," we may argue that he divulges an appositive desire--the desire to contextualize. While Giles aims only to renovate the scope of the sentence, widening his focus from a Chinese romance to a nursing mother in Germany, it seems also accurate to say that he describes the weight of the past as it hangs behind each object, thick and transparent. The appositive is the noun's ghost.
. . .
I think we become adults when we cannot explain our life to anyone without using appositives.
. . .
All I want is to tell you stories about my life.
For each new friend we make, the past becomes an unintended secret.
An invisible hallway unfolds behind each friend's body, hidden from view by that friend's newness.
It makes me lonely.
Deploy your heart past its range. That sound
is not the heart beating. It stammers.
The goal of love is to be unmastered.
This meat is still alive!
--
from "The Invisible Memoir"
Against authenticity. If the exotic is the sensuous enigma, no sensuousness. Zero lyricism of food, night markets, Chinese customs, nature. No use of the appositive, the clause that annotates a noun (e.g., "the clause that annotates a noun").
. . .
When translator Herbert Giles compares this "to the German notion that the spirit of the dead mother, coming back at night to suckle the child she has left behind, makes an impress on the bed alongside the baby," we may argue that he divulges an appositive desire--the desire to contextualize. While Giles aims only to renovate the scope of the sentence, widening his focus from a Chinese romance to a nursing mother in Germany, it seems also accurate to say that he describes the weight of the past as it hangs behind each object, thick and transparent. The appositive is the noun's ghost.
. . .
I think we become adults when we cannot explain our life to anyone without using appositives.
. . .
All I want is to tell you stories about my life.
For each new friend we make, the past becomes an unintended secret.
An invisible hallway unfolds behind each friend's body, hidden from view by that friend's newness.
It makes me lonely.
January 27, 2011
these poems remind me very much of kimiko hahn, tao lin, jenny boully. i was surprised that it was a yale book, since it is a very wave book, and the expectations or interests seem conflicting there. mostly i felt impatient with this book for its fragmented, collages-of-the-mind tone (even though it seems to me like i would enjoy it; maybe i've become worn out by it from looking at all my own similarly loose lines), but i did relate a lot to the "dramatic monologue against the self" and "the city of habits."
Read
January 13, 2019Skipped around a copy dedicated by Ken Chen to one of two owners of a Brooklyn bar, where a man with a possibly Australian accent invited me to play darts with him. I refused to. My shoes were wet. I thought about reaching out to somebody who did not like me via text message. I did not. The cover of the book is a still from a movie I still have not finished, even though I admire the lead actor, who killed himself. Upon exiting I stood briefly next to the other owner of the bar.
June 28, 2013
Messy.
December 1, 2015
"My life is not unbearable yet still I must escape it."
- from "The City of Habits"
- from "The City of Habits"
March 26, 2022
"Deploy your heart past its range."--K.C.
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