Asylum | Quan Barry | University of Pittsburgh Press (2001)

Recommended by Mia: “My holiday reading pick . . . it’s her first collection.  Her engagement with the voices and subjects of the Vietnam War is beautifully executed, and though the scope of her work is much broader, I was most riveted by her ‘war’ poems.”

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Behind My Eyes | Li-Young Lee | W.W. Norton & Company (2008)

Recommended by Iris: “This is Lee’s most recent collection — and it is stunning, as always.  Figurations of the Virgin Mary intertwine with moving landscapes, conversations between the poet and his wife, the transitory spaces of travel, a chance vision of the poet’s father; all hang in a delicate, almost sacred, lumen, suspended somewhere between heaven and earth.  Each poem breathes with an expansiveness and a grave tenderness that only Lee knows how to render. Behind My Eyes is sold with a CD of the poet reading some the poems in the book, and I highly recommend listening to this, as well.  I had the privilege of hearing Lee read from his drafts for this book a few years before it came out, and loved the way that the intonation of his voice seamed through the lines of each poem, threading them together in a low, sonorous hum.  It’s a beautiful listening experience, and adds a new and lovely textural dimension to his already melodious poetics.”

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Call Me Ishmael Tonight | Agha Shahid Ali | W.W. Norton & Company (2003)

Recommended by Supriya: “This collection of ghazals shows the versatile ways in which a poetic form can go beyond its history and language while staying true to its essence. Agha Shahid Ali demonstrates the intentionality with which he overcomes expectations and boundaries by using a traditional form that often evokes feelings of longing and melancholia but writing in a contemporary English that feels timeless. Although written entirely in form, the range and depth of this collection allows for a vast expanse of emotions and possibilities and is the perfect collection with which to curl up whatever your mood.”

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A Gesture Life | Chang-rae Lee | Penguin USA (2000)

Recommended by Ada: “Told from the point of view of Dr. Hata, a Japanese WWII veteran, this fictional memoir weaves between his experiences in a crumbling outpost of a Japanese imperial outpost in the last days of the war and his later life in gated, suburban America. The protagonist in Lee’s second novel is so reasonable it’s eerie, and though I think that we are meant to feel sorry for Dr. Hata and the stiffly respectable, appropriately understated life he has bound himself into, the distance that separates him from all the other characters in this book translates into distance from the reader. Not that the whole book left me cold: the scenes describing Dr. Hata’s encounters with Korean comfort women during the war are eye-opening, gripping, and an interesting perspective on the terrors of war.”

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We also highly recommend any of the titles that we’ve featured in our posts to date.  Some notables:

• The Heart’s Traffic (Ching-In Chen; Arktoi Press 2009)
  [as featured in Supriya Misra's review]
• Juan Luna’s Revolver (Luisa Iglora; UND Press 2008)
  [as featured in our interview with Luisa Igloria]
• Imago (Joseph Legaspi; CavanKerry Press 2007)
  [as featured in Ada Yee's interview with Joseph Legaspi]
• Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Daljit Nagra, Faber & Faber 2007)
  [as featured in Mrigaa Sethi's critique of the poem "Darling and Me!"]
• Half-Lit Houses (Tina Chang; Four Way Books 2004)
  [as featured in Stephen Sohn's post about Four Way]
• Sediment (Sandy Tseng; Four Way Books 2009)
  [as  featured in Stephen Sohn's post about Four Way]
• World Ball Notebook (Sesshu Foster; City Lights 2009)
  [as featured in this post, and in our post about the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards]
• Beasts for the Chase (Monica Ferrell; Sarabande Books 2008)
  [as featured in our post about the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards]
• An Aquarium (Jeffrey Yang; Graywolf  Press 2008)
  [as featured in our post about the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards]

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Please help support poets and the presses that publish them by considering picking up one or two of these titles as something to keep you occupied on that long plane ride, as a gift for a literature-loving friend, or simply as a winter afternoon treat.  What else is on your reading list for the holidays?  Comment and let us know!

The Heart's Traffic

Ching-In Chen’s debut, The Heart’s Traffic, is an ideal beginning. The 117-page collection encompasses an amazing breadth of styles, including several distinct forms (e.g., sestina, villanelle, haibun, pantoum) as well as the poet’s own innovative arrangements. But beyond her technical prowess, this work resonates with me in its explorations of community and self, of the process of discovering where we do or do not belong through our simultaneous attempts to blend and resist multiple worlds and identities. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, we all seek to reconcile our personal present with the collective past.

This novel-in-poems tells the tale of Xiaomei — her father’s then family’s move to America as well as her own process of exploration and discovery during and immediately after these transitions. Chen beautifully captures the conflicted relationship of immigrants with the land of their ancestors, with their loved ones, and with themselves. The narrative is nonlinear but linked, with images and lines weaving through multiple pieces. Together, the collection serves as a series of snapshots that only reveal glimmers of Xiaomei’s life. Chen skillfully arranges the collection to build toward a larger understanding of both Xiaomei’s experiences and what it means to be a young immigrant in America. I appreciated re-visiting certain poems and seeing multiple layers emerge as I moved through the overarching story.

Some pieces are written as riddles or letters, unfolding partially into questions or answers. These, like many of the pieces, represent a constant pull in multiple directions. There is the recurrent image of absence, epitomized by images of a father who leaves home for America, who returns Americanized, who uproots his family. Thus begins a conflicted relationship with America itself, which at first is unfamiliar and then becomes home. In one precise poem, Xiaomei tries to reconcile her dreams with the expectations of her mother. Xiaomei’s other relationships are equally intense, equally complex. Without being didactic, Chen is able to incorporate the space around sexual and gender identities.

Chen understands the struggles between distance and closeness, the blurred boundaries, the inability to separate one identity or place from another. This excerpt from “The TrueTale of Xiaomei” may serve as a microcosm for a recurrent motif, capturing not only this disconnect but the need to find peace:

To love your own violent histories,

the remembered soup of your failings,

and to forgive those who have failed before you,

generation upon generation,

of the most mad,

the most terrible,

the deadliest secrets crossing the ocean.

We do not bury our dead, but hack them into shanks we lay on our backs,

bearing them forever into each new world.

Ching-In Chen powerfully uses a range of forms and arrangements, strengthened through the persona of Xiaomei. This collection will resonate with anyone who has struggled with expectations of self and others, tried to reconcile her past with her present, wondered how our roots inform who we are, and, ultimately, sought to go beyond that and grow into herself.