Ching-In Chen, Shiny City

 

american syntax

The teacher straightback,
face me off, her eyes.
            My face in cleave of
her shoulder, my bones
sitting high my cheek.
            The word proper
arrives in 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.

I’m intrigued by the way Redmond, Washington-based “genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher” Ching-In Chen’s latest poetry title, following a couple of chapbooks and full-length collections The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017; winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), is Shiny City (Portland OR: Airlie Press, 2025). According to the cover blurb, Shiny City is a collection that “examines the ‘real’ and imagined history of Riverside, California’s Chinatown, juxtaposed with a speculative shiny city of the global future. Word by word, syntax by syntax, Chen projects the essential and unrecorded voices of the Chinese immigrants who picked and packed fruit in Riverdale’s citrus groves and worked as house servants in the late 1800’s through the 1930’s, as well as the travelers and inhabitants of ‘shiny city’ as they navigate its accelerated process of growth and decay.” Wonderfully expansive, Chen’s lyric assembles into a collection via collage, setting poem-against-poem, offering multiple perspectives across generations. There’s a way that Chen utilizes physical space and pacing across the page I find intriguing. The poems are expansive, composing constellations across each page through collage, setting words, pause and breath in open space, such as the poem “switchboard operateor,” that offers:

lady wants my face                                                       $53,655
                                                                                    pinned
to nudge memory at dry day end 

 

she says her long path                                            ordinances of murder
      I wont understand                     break a fail flee 

witness strike mines   close twenty-eight

 

 

                                                                                    summons    separate set of stairs
murdered by white
                        other ladies in her twirling                               arms

 

Shiny City has shades reminiscent of Vancouver poet Wayde Compton’s 49^th Parallel Psalm (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1999) or even Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1974; Vancouver BC: Ronsdale Press, 2001), attempting to articulate a geographic space through a particular group of inhabitants. Chen works through archive and memory, articulating the immediacy of a physical and cultural landscape that moves back generations. “man whose name drown in photograph,” Chen writes, to close “chinese workers at usda lab, 1904,” “all I have                   his upper body / grasping hand            beyond this America // belly tree full of dust       my father sell / vegetables grown from home [.]”

 

 

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part three, : Lillian Nećakov + LM Rochefort,

[Aoife's small press fair debut, selling copies of her books ; see part one here; see part two here] Be aware the next ottawa small press book fair is November 14 at Tom Brown Arena, yes? And the above/ground press thirty-third anniversary event, by the way, will be on August 22^nd at Anina’s Café in Vanier, which is pretty exciting. Have you caught this year’s above/ground press  anniversary sale? And don’t forget that myself and above/ground press will be attending the Fisher Library Small Press Fair in Toronto on September 19! Unfortunately, I’m unable to get to this year’s Meet the Presses event in November, but you should, if you are able.

Toronto ON/Grand Lake NB: The latest from Toronto poet Lillian Nećakov [see my review of her latest, a book-length collaboration with Gary Barwin, here], and further to russell carisse’s sider0xylon press, is the chapbook MARIA (2026), hand-produced in an edition of twenty-five copies. Set as a collection of extended prose-pieces, Nećakov’s endless, surrealist, chapbook-length epistolary prose-sentence exists as a rush, presented by a nameless narrator to an unseen, unknown “Maria,” writing a mad push, and both the typesetting and ink smell provide even further an association with the work of jwcurry. A curious, delightful and even slightly disturbing text. Is there a curry echo here, purposefully? As the chapbook ends:

Maria thank you I’ll pull out your teeth not just for the fold I’m a man with a gun Maria my hands are shaking for you there’s a truck out back it’s goddamn heaven I tell you my skull is this big with the commandments I said it on the tv thank you I’m wearing it Maria everyday like a leash.

[russell carisse] 

Ottawa ON: LM Rochefort has been such a fixture in the Ottawa poetry/literary scene for so long, attending readings and workshops, including reading and publishing her own work, that it is a bit surprising to see that only now are we seeing her chapbook-length debut (although already in a second printing), Living with the Animals (Pinhole Poetry, 2026). There is always something clean and precise about Rochefort’s lyric, a descriptive and exacting density, one that provides not only a narrative patter but one thick with imagery and detailed attention.

Schoolyard Moose

A moose’s antlers rise above the chain-link fence
Pale orange and yellow leaves echo tree’s underbelly 

Children dawdle, huddle, peek at treasures in closed fists
A few remaining flowers scream this space is still a garden 

Buckskin shade imitates pale yellow chrysanthemums
Even moose know the colour of slighted love 

Morning ruckus stilled by a shot of anesthetic
The beast lolls in the back of a red pick-up 

Cold rain drips gloss on the painted world
At the day’s fallen washed clean

 

[post-fair hijinks] 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Bridget Huh

Bridget Huh is a queer Korean-Canadian poet from Toronto. She holds an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, and her poems have appeared in The Walrus, Gulf Coast, The Margins and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2023 Vallum Poetry Award and has been recognized for awards in North American Review, Fugue Journal, and Palette Poetry. Her debut collection of poetry, Fugue Body, was published by Véhicule Press in 2025.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I had to learn how to stand behind my work. Publishing a book meant I had to change how I see my work, especially older work, which feels so easy to dismiss. I’m no longer the same poet who wrote the poems in Fugue Body (though it hasn’t been very long) but I’m trying to be tender towards my younger self who was new to poetry and hadn’t yet figured out what her concerns might be.

I met so many people in the writing of this book who believed in it. That’s obviously life-changing, to learn that my work might connect with both people I care deeply about and complete strangers.

I think my most recent work is very different from Fugue Body. It's more playful. A little weirder, I hope. And most importantly it’s gayer.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

A high school teacher introduced me to the work of queer poets like Kai Cheng Thom, Vivek Shraya, Leah Horlick, and Hieu Minh Nguyen, and I remember feeling so seen by the recommendation and their work. I wrote poetry throughout high school, but that was the first time I felt like my writing could have a kind of purpose, as a way to understand my identity and my relationship to whiteness and and heteronormativity. I came to poetry through reading other poets who were brave and vulnerable, who were honest about who they were and their experience in the world as marginalized. I had no idea you could do that.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I try to start as soon as an idea comes to me. I like riding the excitement of exploring a nascent project. I wouldn’t say I’m a fast writer, but I’m not particularly slow, either. I don’t self-edit as I write. My work rarely comes out of notes. If anything, the work is the notes.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I still don’t know exactly where poems begin for me. I think my poems begin in my experience of language, of being in between languages. The strangeness of being between languages or being stranded by language is always exciting to me.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love doing readings! I find them incredibly energizing. I also think the cadence of a poem is so reliant on the breath. Reading out loud, privately or publicly, brings out the musicality that poetry is always reaching back towards. Public readings also help me figure out who the audience for a particular poem is.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Can language repair? How can defamiliarizing language sharpen our attention to our lives and loves? What is the utility of nonsense?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

To pursue their own curiosities. To be present.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Working with an outside editor or reader has helped me become aware of my own intent much more quickly. I struggle to articulate my intent on my own, and I appreciate being pushed to develop it fully.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Open the shop, even if no one comes in.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t have a strict writing routine, but I usually write in the evenings.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

            I’ve been turning to other languages when I get stalled. In our workshop last year, we were asked to write three new poems a week, which I found difficult. I would often draft poems in Korean or Spanish and then translate them into English. I found the formal constraint of my poor vocabulary freeing, and it introduced an element of strangeness that I really enjoyed.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of parking garages.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music, always. I was obsessed with the Sibelius Violin Concerto and that formed a significant part of Fugue Body. I was also thinking about the fugue, the baroque musical form, as a model for the form of the title poem, where three different themes (music, race, desire) were threaded into each other at the site of the speaker’s body.

Recently, I’ve been working on an ekphrastic series looking at Caroline Monnet’s Pizandawatc. It’s such an exciting way to think about sound and speech and materiality.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

            The writers I will always return to for my work are Kim Hyesoon, Anne Carson, Marina Tsvetaeva, Christina Sharpe, and Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha.

My friends are so important for my work not only in their attention and insight but also in the hilarious things they say. I have at least three poems in my new manuscript that are built on things they said that I wanted to remember and noted down. (Shoutout Mai Mageed and Aishvarya Arora.) And my poetry cohort-mates, Gerardo Azpiri Iglesias, Ella Shively, and Sam Samakande, are so singularly talented and have helped my writing grow so much.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would love to publish a translation.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I would attempt visual art. Whenever I watch my visual artist friends work, I’m jealous that they get to make something material and real. And so much more immediate, for the viewer.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Being aware of my relationship with language. And I love language as a material.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a new manuscript! I’m still figuring it out, but I’m excited to see where it’ll go.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Taryn Hubbard, Beautiful Unknown Future

 

Sweetie notices my sudden shift in attention and tries to draw me back to another world. I must focus so hard now on my paid tasks. None of this comes easily anymore.

Mostly, I’m failing at all this, and it will be discussed in-depth at my weekly one-on-one. I don’t remember much about being a small child. I don’t have an authentic first memory. I can’t remember how I felt about things when they were new. My identity has formed by processing and reprocessing, which means I’m changing all the time and most things feel strange, out of sync.

Now I write everything down, because I’d never remember otherwise. I document. I fill massive amounts of online storage with poorly shot photos of my daily life that I’ll never post publicly, but I’ll look at sometimes late at night. And sometimes it is just enough to warrant keeping everything. It’s the photos of my children that I appreciate the most. The app I use has mentioned their little faces and is monitoring how they age. It makes these highlight videos of them with muzak, and I have to say, our privacy is a small price to pay for something so adorable. (“SWEETIE”)

From Chilliwack, British Columbia poet Taryn Hubbard, following Desire Path (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020) [see my review of such here] and The Very Good Best Friend (Winnipeg MB: Now or Never Publishing, 2025), comes Beautiful Unknown Future (Talonbooks, 2026), a curious book-length lyric collage assembled into section-clusters. Set with opening poem “COMPASSION,” the collection is organized into “SWEETIE,” “FLIGHT,” “STRANERS,” “REACTION,” “BEAUTY” and “SPECTRE,” presenting a lyric of prose poems and line breaks; a lyric centred around, it would seem, the sentence itself. “the mama bear / who lives in / the pocket of forest / left behind the / cul-de-sac,” begins the poem that begins the collection, “has been food / conditioned to seek / Skip the Dishes / straight from / neighbourhood / trash cans [.]” The poems that accumulate into Beautiful Unknown Future give the sense of lyric journal entries, self contained but interconnected, amid an isolation and anxiety through and around children, parenting and climate, offering a suggestion of Covid-era isolation with small children, but slightly fictionalized, held to a series of responses over any direct sense of the document. “my feelings about the weather / swing from relieved to concerned,” she writes, mid-way through the collection, “both summer and winter are extremely / uncertain times [.]” As much as anything, this is a document working through her anxiety through that particular period of isolation with small children, attempting to see her way through such, Covid-era or not, articulating games and stories with the children, climate concerns and other threads that float through her attention. As the “NOTE” at the end of the collection begins:

Beautiful Unknown Future came from a desire to document parts of my everyday life and thinking while I was in the early days of raising my children. While these poems aren’t completely autobiographical in a traditional sense, they bring together aspects of my daily life from 2021 to 2025. As a global pandemic and record-breaking heat and rain not only made the headlines but were experienced on an individual and personal level day after day, the unprecedented began to slowly feel familiar, and I wanted to document those early feelings. During this time as well, my son was born and my daughter was learning more about the nuances of communication. The character of Sweetie started as a way to document some lessons and teachings between my daughter and me, but then quickly expanded into more of a presence of something that wasn’t there physically but lived somewhere in my heart or at the back of my mind, just out of sight. It went like this, I might think. Or, the thing you need to know is … and this device became a gateway straight into the bluntness of what I’d been thinking about, a one-way ticket to the tow-away zone.