Book Review: When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen

Reviewed by John W. W. Zeiser

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
Poems by Chen Chen
BOA Editions, April 2017
$16.00; 96 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1942683339

Chen Chen’s debut collection is thoroughly of the moment, its energy devoted to explaining who Chen Chen is and how he got here. It tells the many stories that collude into identity: a mother, and a family, who cannot accept their son being gay, who blame it on their emigration, on the moral decay of the United States; a boy who grows up American, but is still seen as Chinese despite only the vaguest memories of the country and life there; a twenty-something, caught in the orbits of MFA programs, places like Brooklyn, the life of the precariat. All these are told in a fresh, playful, and often lonely voice shot through with references to high and low art, Celan and Kafka and Optimus Prime.

Somehow pre-empting or acknowledging that Chen Chen is greater than the sum of his parts, “Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls” bites back:

                                                                                            Trying to get
over what my writer friend said, All you write about is being gay or Chinese.
Wish I had thought to say to him, All you write about is being white

or an asshole. Wish I had said, No, I already write about everything—

And what that everything is will always be specific to the person viewing and recording it. Try as we may, we can only be ourselves and that is what makes Chen Chen’s debut so welcome.

John W. W. Zeiser is a poet, critic and journalist in Los Angeles. He is a frequent contributor to the Asian Review of Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books. You may follow him @jwwz