#ching-in chen

[teachingtotransgress]

Ching-in Chen, diagram a ghost

[Text ID: in January, I was a girl / not a city / streetless and star remote]

[ijustkindalikebooks]

Review: Alone Together: Love, Grief & Comfort in the time of COVID-19 edited by Jennifer Haupt. 

Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort During the Time of COVID-19 is a collection of essays, poems, and interviews to serve as a lifeline for negotiating how to connect and thrive during this stressful time of isolation as well as a historical perspective that will remain relevant for years to come. All contributing authors and business partners are donating their share to The Book Industry Charitable Foundation, a nonprofit organization that coordinates charitable programs to strengthen the bookselling community.  

This book is put together really wonderfully, and Haupt has assembled an incredible array of essayists, poets and writers in this book that really allow you to empathise, care and appreciate the people this pandemic is affecting. From those staying at home to those who still have people on the frontline, this book really does allow you to see every perspective and makes for sometimes sad, sometimes funny, sometimes tender moments. 

Beginning with the poems that are included in this anthology, there are so many highlights. ‘I Kind Of Want To Love The World But I Have No Idea How To Hold It’ by Kelli Russell Agodon and Melissa Studdard is a short but brilliant poem of comfort in this collection. One of the many highlights of the Connect section, ‘Dear O’ by Ching-In Chen is beautifully done and the words are just so beautifully put together moments  in the book. 

Accompanying these poems are interviews, personal writings and essays which are true gems. Devi S Laskar’s ‘State Of The Union, State Of The Art’ is poetic and brilliantly put together in this book and ‘Recipe For Connection’by Jennifer Rosner is a really lovely piece of writing that talks of family and food, something that during this for me has been something important and really brought my home together. What I love about these pieces is there honesty and how the authors share a sliver of their lives with the world within this collection. 

Anthologies are hard to perfect and of course some things are going to call the reader more than others, and that is true for me here, with the connecting and funny moments really calling to me, ‘Pandemic Date Night’ by Sommer Browning and David Shields being one I especially loved in this collection. A time capsule of the time we’ve spent alone together this book memorialises a very strange time, but also a time where people for the most part worked together for the greater good and that deserves a book as good as this. 

(I received an ARC from NetGalley for honest review). 

[sinetheta]

The word proper arrives in the hall.  The order of things, rolling neat into pine drawers, dead- clean. Squeezed juice of greedy sponge.              Her teeth not match. One chipped.  The corner lifted, peeking a window, furtive.              The other, pearl, round and perfect, looming above my arched head.  About to bite

American Syntax by Ching-in Ch’en. 2014.

Ching-in Chen is a poet and organiser based in Houston, US. A child of Chinese immigrants, Ching-in Chen’s work deals as much with quotidian anecdotes based in community organising as it does with the experimentation and queering of form. They are a Kundiman, Lambda, Callaloo and Watering Hole fellow, and have published two works of poetry: The Heart’s Traffic and recombinant. Chen currently works at the Sam Houston State University teaching creative writing. In American Syntax, Chen illicts a sense of the diasporic experience counterposed with rigidity of English grammar- hinting in the imagery a sense of defiance in the simple presence of the imperfect tooth.

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture. 

[chenchenwrites]

Contributor copy’s here—I’ve got 2 erasures of Michael Derrick Hudson’s poem from Best American Poetry 2015 in the new Texas Review! Thanks & hearts to Ching-In Chen for asking me to send work. 

These erasures are a response to MDH’s appropriation of Yi-Fen Chou, a Chinese American woman’s name, & explore both the limits and possibilities of English—as a language, as a colonizing history & present, as a tool for those marginalized to seek/build liberation. 

So glad to have work in this issue alongside Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Vidhu Aggarwal, Steven Sanchez, Noor Ibn Najam, torrin a. greathouse, Haven Gomez, Vincent Toro, & others.

[18mr]

Islamophobia affects us all - Muslim or not. For Sunayana Dumala, the widow of the victim of Kansas hate crime Srinivas Kuchibhotla, it meant losing both her husband and immigration status.

Poetry by: Ching-In Chen

[voirlvmer]

Ching-In Chen, from “Queer Poetry: a zuihitsu”

[orrinonline]

Queer Poetry: a zuihitsu by Ching-In Chen

I have never met anyone who looked like me.

You asked me to write about queer as genre, poetry as genre—and all I can think of in terms of intersections is failure and scatter. What Kind; sort; style, asks the Oxford English Dictionary. I am obsessed with the zuihitsu poetic form, a hybrid Japanese form which utilizes subjective lists, journal entries, juxtaposition, fragmentation, etcetera, to create a sense of randomness which is not really random. Because it is messy, chaotic, contradictory, it is a form I frequently return to, especially when I do not always know what and how to say. It is a form which maps and contains my fear.

“My poetry is often guided by an impulse to fail. When this is the case, writing is an attempt to salvage something from the mess.” —Douglas Kearney 

I moved to Milwaukee from California and met five queer Asian people (not me, though I have been referred to myself multiple times—is this a mistake? Are others mistaking me for me? Do I look like myself?) This is totally subjective—I moved to Milwaukee for poetry, not for queerness. Yet the search becomes what I frustrate, what pushes me to lineate, what creates the next line, what is filled up here.

What are the essential qualities that make up this loneliness?

Queer sorts: 

One moved with me from California for school.

One I met in a cafe with leafy greens overhead. We met there because he drank tea, not coffee (my uncle—a handyman—in another life dreamt of opening a teashop). I think he had been persuaded to meet with me as a recruitment/retainment strategy. One of us had been tricked to be there? My mother was visiting, and we talked about whether he would be comfortable if she came along. She said, you go ahead, I don’t want to make him uncomfortable. It was a matter-of-fact conversation, and I cannot remember another one about this topic with my mother.

One told me the only queer (gay? lesbian?) Asians she knew in the city were her two siblings.

One told me he was glad to be moving away because he felt unsafe.

One spent a night with me in a red bar, coastal people, fast talkers both. When I met her, not wanting to assume, I asked—do you identify as Asian? Are you ____? 

None of them are like me, exactly, yet I want.

In another blog entry, writing from the past, Bhanu Kapil: “I become so familiar with this scene that at one point, I lie down on the ground instead. I exchange my body with the body of another girl. I wait for something to happen, and it does.” 

When I left California, an old friend from my MFA program told me that she had seen my doppelganger in the MFA program. By the time she had gone up to her to say something, my twin had replied: I know, I know, I look like Ching-In.

I have never met anyone who looked like me. Or is this a lie?

Last week, at Las Dos Brujas Writing Workshop with Kimiko Hahn, poet who originated writing zuihitsu (as poetry? as essay? neither? all of the above?) in English. On Wednesday night, in the middle of the week, her reading was sparsely attended. I cried; it felt like a reflection on me. We are not interchangeable bodies, yet my body feels related to hers, familial. If she disappears (ridiculous!), will I not be seen (a fear), not be related to (a fear), not be recognized (a fear), not be made sense of (a fear).

In this extreme city, my bodies become multiple. How do you like to be addressed? Them, I reply, and they nod. At Kochanski’s Concertina Beer Hall, where I have just performed with my band, the owner/bartender mistook me for a Sir and apologized. That’s okay, I reply, I identify as multiply-gendered. A trans man at the next table is indignant on my behalf and asks me how I feel. How I feel? These words all originate from my bodies.

“Because to fail to define your world, your nation, means disappearing from it. Latinos, they’re banning your books in Arizona, and no one is saying anything about it. They’re failing your children in cities across the nation. Your elders are dying off, and are being forgotten. They want you gone, forgotten. They don’t want to hear your voice, because your voice complicates the story. Who’s they? You tell me. A complicated story is a true story.” —Rich Villar

I buy Kimiko’s reading copy of Toxic Flora after her books sell out. She looks through the book for errant writing. I tell her I don’t mind, but she says if she has made notes, she needs them. She writes me a note, but I lend my book out to another writer and do not see until after she has exited the premises: “Good to see you so often and now here.”

“From indicates a particular time or place as a starting point; from refers to a specific location as the first of two limits; from imagines a cause, an agent, an instrument, a source, or an origin; from marks separation, removal, or exclusion; from differentiates borders. ‘Where are you from?’” —Craig Santos Perez

Is the answer not a poem?

This piece was originally published in the Metre Maids blog in 2012.

[smallpressdistribution]

"we each left home

to place new juice in our mouths"

- Ching-In Chen

Good Morning, Internet! 

XO, SPD