When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family—the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes—all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love.

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

To be a season of laughter
when my father says
his coworker is like that, he can tell
because the guy wears pink
socks, see, you don't, so you
can't, you can't be
one of them.

To be the one
my parents raised me
to be. A season
from the stormiest planet.
A very good feeling
with a man
.Every feeling,

in pink shoes.
Every step, hot pink.

Chen Chen: was born in Xiamen, China, and grew up in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in two chapbooks and in such publications as Poetry, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry. The recipient of the 2016 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, he has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation, Lambda Literary, and in 2015, he was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships. He earned his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University. He lives in Lubbock, Texas, where he is pursuing a PhD in at Texas Tech University.

“WINNER OF THE A. POULIN, JR. POETRY PRIZE ON NPR BOOKS''S LIST OF ''POERTY TO PAY ATTENTION TO: 2017''S BEST VERSE'' "What does Millennial poetry look like? One answer might be this wild debut from Chen Chen. He seems to run at the mouth, free-associating wildly, switching between lingo and ''higher'' forms of diction. Nothing''s out of bounds or off limits, no culture too ''pop'' to find its place in poetry . . . nor anything too silly to point the way toward serious aims. And yet this is a deeply serious and moving book about Chinese-American experience, young love, poetry, family, and the family one makes amongst friends." --NPR Books "The collection, as the title itself suggests, is about ''further possibilities,'' about revising, reinventing, and reimagining the relational modes we currently have. If we are all tasked with being ''someone ''for' someone else--a son, a friend, a partner, a student, a dear love,'' we cannot afford to be complacent or static in the ways that we inhabit and think about those relations. Interdependence is at the heart of Chen's writing, and if we are to survive in these troubled times, we must continue to believe that there really are new ways to find the impossible honey." --Up the Staircase Quarterly "The word ''stanza' means one thing when it refers to a poem: a snippet of text, a line or several. In Italian, it means ''room.' Poet Chen Chen combines those definitions when he writes, thinking: what should be in the room of this poem? In his earlier work, he began to answer that question with pieces that explored his own intersecting identities, parts of himself that other people told him could not exist at once..." -- PBS Newshour "Chen Chen refuses to be boxed in or nailed down. He is a poet of Whitman's multitudes and of Langston Hughes''s blues, of Dickinson''s ''so cold no fire can warm me'' and of Michael Palmer's comic interrogation. What unifies the brilliance of When I Grow up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is a voice desperate to believe that within every one of life's sadnesses there is also hope, meaning, and--if we are willing to laugh at ourselves--humor. This is a book I wish existed when I first began reading poetry. Chen is a poet I'll be reading for the rest of my life." --Jericho Brown "Chen Chen is already one of my favorite poets ever. Funny, absurd, bitter, surreal, always surprising, and deeply in love with this flawed world. I''m in love with this book." --Sherman Alexie "The radioactive spider that bit Chen Chen [isn't that how first books get made?] gave him powers both demonic and divine. The bite transmitted vision, worry, want, memory of China, America's grief, and People magazine, as well as a radical queer critique of the normative. What a gift that bite was--linguistic, erotic, politic and impolitic, idiosyncratic and emphatic. What a blessing and burden to write out of the manifold possibilities of that contact." --Bruce Smith "I so deeply love this poet's imagination where old shoes might walk back up the steps of a house, where one speaker pledges ''allegiance to the already fallen snow' and another says ''Let's put our briefcases on our heads, in the sudden rain, // & continue meeting as if we've just been given our names.' In precise and gorgeous language, Chen Chen shows us that the world is strange and bright with ardor. He reminds us of the miracle of the sensual and sensory. This is a book I will return to whenever I forget what a poem can do, whenever I am in need of song or hope. If a peony wrote poems in a human language, I think that these would be his poems. If the rain wrote poems... I mean: this is an important work by an astonishing and vital voice." --Aracelis Girmay”

WINNER OF THE A. POULIN, JR. POETRY PRIZE ON NPR BOOKS'S LIST OF 'POERTY TO PAY ATTENTION TO: 2017'S BEST VERSE' ON TRACK FOUR JOURNAL'S LIST OF 'TEN OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED POETRY COLLECTIONS BY PEOPLE OF COLOR IN 2017' "What does Millennial poetry look like? One answer might be this wild debut from Chen Chen. He seems to run at the mouth, free-associating wildly, switching between lingo and 'higher' forms of diction. Nothing's out of bounds or off limits, no culture too 'pop' to find its place in poetry ... nor anything too silly to point the way toward serious aims. And yet this is a deeply serious and moving book about Chinese-American experience, young love, poetry, family, and the family one makes amongst friends." --NPR Books "The collection, as the title itself suggests, is about 'further possibilities,' about revising, reinventing, and reimagining the relational modes we currently have. If we are all tasked with being 'someone 'for' someone else--a son, a friend, a partner, a student, a dear love,' we cannot afford to be complacent or static in the ways that we inhabit and think about those relations. Interdependence is at the heart of Chen's writing, and if we are to survive in these troubled times, we must continue to believe that there really are new ways to find the impossible honey." --Up the Staircase Quarterly "The word 'stanza' means one thing when it refers to a poem: a snippet of text, a line or several. In Italian, it means 'room.' Poet Chen Chen combines those definitions when he writes, thinking: what should be in the room of this poem? In his earlier work, he began to answer that question with pieces that explored his own intersecting identities, parts of himself that other people told him could not exist at once..." --PBS Newshour "Chen Chen refuses to be boxed in or nailed down. He is a poet of Whitman's multitudes and of Langston Hughes's blues, of Dickinson's 'so cold no fire can warm me' and of Michael Palmer's comic interrogation. What unifies the brilliance of When I Grow up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is a voice desperate to believe that within every one of life's sadnesses there is also hope, meaning, and--if we are willing to laugh at ourselves--humor. This is a book I wish existed when I first began reading poetry. Chen is a poet I'll be reading for the rest of my life." --Jericho Brown "Chen Chen is already one of my favorite poets ever. Funny, absurd, bitter, surreal, always surprising, and deeply in love with this flawed world. I'm in love with this book." --Sherman Alexie "The radioactive spider that bit Chen Chen [isn't that how first books get made?] gave him powers both demonic and divine. The bite transmitted vision, worry, want, memory of China, America's grief, and People magazine, as well as a radical queer critique of the normative. What a gift that bite was--linguistic, erotic, politic and impolitic, idiosyncratic and emphatic. What a blessing and burden to write out of the manifold possibilities of that contact." --Bruce Smith "I so deeply love this poet's imagination where old shoes might walk back up the steps of a house, where one speaker pledges 'allegiance to the already fallen snow' and another says 'Let's put our briefcases on our heads, in the sudden rain, // & continue meeting as if we've just been given our names.' In precise and gorgeous language, Chen Chen shows us that the world is strange and bright with ardor. He reminds us of the miracle of the sensual and sensory. This is a book I will return to whenever I forget what a poem can do, whenever I am in need of song or hope. If a peony wrote poems in a human language, I think that these would be his poems. If the rain wrote poems... I mean: this is an important work by an astonishing and vital voice." --Aracelis Girmay

Chen Chen was born in Xiamen, China, and grew up in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in two chapbooks and in such publications as Poetry, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry. The recipient of the 2016 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, he has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation, Lambda Literary, and in 2015, he was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships. He earned his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. Chen lives in Lubbock, Texas, with his partner, Jeff Gilbert, and their pug dog, Rupert Giles. Jericho Brown is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), was named one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. Brown earned a PhD from the University of Houston, an MFA from the University of New Orleans, and a BA from Dillard University. He is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Emory University in Atlanta.

In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family--the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes--all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love. When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities To be a season of laughter when my father says his coworker is like that, he can tell because the guy wears pink socks, see, you don't, so you can't, you can't be one of them. To be the one my parents raised me to be. A season from the stormiest planet. A very good feeling with a man . Every feeling, in pink shoes. Every step, hot pink. Chen Chen: was born in Xiamen, China, and grew up in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in two chapbooks and in such publications as Poetry, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry . The recipient of the 2016 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, he has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation, Lambda Literary, and in 2015, he was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships. He earned his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University. He lives in Lubbock, Texas, where he is pursuing a PhD in at Texas Tech University.

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