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 [.]”