{"id":3369,"date":"2011-03-29T07:00:16","date_gmt":"2011-03-29T11:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=3369"},"modified":"2011-03-29T10:43:02","modified_gmt":"2011-03-29T14:43:02","slug":"review-lisa-chens-mouth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/29\/review-lisa-chens-mouth\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Lisa Chen’s MOUTH"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Mouth<\/a> by Lisa Chen | Kaya Press 2007 | $13.95<\/em><\/p>\n

The cover image of this square-shaped book previews the poems well. It’s a photo of a brick tenement bombed with graffiti wildstyles in suburban browns and blues. One letter’s tail stretches generously through a sill in the wall to become a finger flipping us off. Someone has abandoned a road bike in front of the wall and a\u00a0plain plank laid out like a welcome mat. Reading these poems is an experience of urban ekstasis, an out-of-body splash of sight that stops the pedestrian reader. Lisa Chen sprays up the walls of poetry to show where our grammar and vision have gone dry.<\/p>\n

What a wonder it is to see the world through Chen’s language! We see a \u201cface filling the night like a bare back \/ Turned away from you in sleep.\u201d The look on another’s \u201cas I leave is a porch light left burning at dawn.\u201d And a woman whose \u201cEnglish isn’t so good. Slang, her mouth the color of turned salmon.\u201d Chen writes in \u201cTranslators’ Apologia,\u201d \u201cI have tried to approximate a sea with a stream of piss\u201d and that approximation itself opens an astonishingly vivid world. Her phrases seize with naked incisions.<\/p>\n

The collection’s tone is set in the opening title poem, \u201cMouth.\u201d The speaker is in a situation, literally and figuratively, \u201cwhere [she doesn’t] speak the language.\u201d The spoken word is\u00a0stifled yet emergent, gritty and gnarled, as we see variously in lines like: \u201ccocktail boozer slurring the voila<\/em> delirious,\u201d \u201cthe shill slag of bad guitar and motel ashtrays,\u201d and \u201cthe sloe-eyed, two-fisted mouth\u201d among others. The speaker resorts to body language, \u201chands thrust in the air \/ in grim universal gestures\u201d which translates here to bartering at the market, a game of demonstrating desire and the ability to walk away.
\n<\/p>\n

Estrangement\u2014more specifically, strangers in urbanity\u2014is another theme <\/span>taken up by <\/span>t<\/span>h<\/span>ese poems. \u201cCrossed Signals\u201d is a missed connection at a 24-hour buffet: \u201cBelieve me when I say my mouth longs to utter what it does not know: your name.\u201d In \u201cThings That Are Distant Though Near\u201d we blink through quieted observations\u2014makeup on a face, a\u00a0schism in relationships\u2014while talk goes on, largely unheard and,<\/span> in these poems,<\/span> unrecorded. Similarly, loquacity in and out of context composes poems like \u201cQuote\/Unquote,\u201d \u201cI Didn’t Always Look This Way,\u201d and \u201cChinese Ghost Stories\u201d which is a found poem of spliced quotations.<\/p>\n

Human injustice demands a global scale in \u201cHuman Interest\u201d and \u201cStudy for a Border Killing.\u201d In the former, \u201cWhen you say genocide, my mind goes blank. Numbers are a dumb sum.\u201d For crimes to be non-abstract, that is to say not dumb, there must be an audience, complete with a \u201ctake-home message\u201d and a rhetoric of narrative detail. But the poem closes with a tinge of cynicism as the speaker says, after listing atrocities with perverse curiosity: \u201cI think you’re onto something. I’m with you.\u201d In \u201cBorder Killing,\u201d we are treated to similarly exquisite detail, but a single interjection, \u201cHis family\u2014was this what you wanted to know?\u2014called him Junie<\/em>,\u201d makes stark the rhetoric of sympathy. I read in this a political dissatisfaction with both cold facts and rosy-warm pathos. It may be of interest that Chen has a history in journalism and also co-authored a book entitled The She Spot: W<\/em>hy Women are the Market for Changing the World and How to Reach Them<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lastly, if one is to go on making crude categories, a number of these poems address\u00a0Chen’s background and interest in the Asian American immigrant experience. The second poem of the collection, \u201cThe Old Widow,\u201d hushes together the silliness (perhaps eeriness) of modern people and the anachronistic grandeur of ancestor worship. \u201cSongs of Gold Mountain\u201d embeds lines from the Angel Island poems into new soliloquies This is followed by \u201cParachute Girls,\u201d which disenchants the American immigrant dream stereotypes three girls from Taipei, Seoul, and Hong Kong. Among other qualities explained to us, we are instructed: \u201cYou can get them to do just about anything because no one tells them what American girls do\u201d and \u201cThey swear at you in their language because the dirtiest words are the ones you are born with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite (maybe because of) the acuity and talent in this collection, I’m left with a vaguely disappointed sense that Chen is skirting personality. Except in poems like \u201cThe Old Widow\u201d and \u201cSeven Chinese Brothers\u201d there is no identifiably personal \u201cI.\u201d This is not the result of an objectivist and disengaged attitude; rather, the often terse and oblique syntax, the prismatic fragmentation of self as subject, seem to be an avoidance or dismissal. Sometimes it feels like watching Wallace Stevens doing a crossword puzzle, putting up his finger not to be approached. This may say more about my aesthetic and philosophy than Chen’s, but these poems in all their virtuosity make me wonder how many personal risks they took. Nevertheless, I’m surprised that this debut collection hasn’t received more attention since its <\/span>publication in 2007, and I do recommend it\u2014for the poet’s frequently astonishing urban vision and her equally astonishing translations thereof.<\/p>\n

Editor’s Note: Interested in reading Mouth<\/span>?\u00a0 Enter our Prompt Contest<\/a><\/em> for a chance to win a copy of your own.\u00a0 Many thanks to Kaya Press for their generous sponsorship.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mouth by Lisa Chen | Kaya Press 2007 | $13.95 The cover image of this square-shaped book previews the poems well. It’s a photo of a brick tenement bombed with graffiti wildstyles in suburban browns and blues. One letter’s tail stretches generously through a sill in the wall to become a finger flipping us off. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[576,577],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3369"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3369"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3437,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3369\/revisions\/3437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}