Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), selected by Jericho Brown for the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The New York […]
Chen Chen offers some advice to young writers.
Chen Chen reads and talks about Kazumi Chin’s poem “The Very Last New Year’s Resolution,” from Chin’s collection Having a Coke With Godzilla.
Time dripped from the faucet like a magician’s botched trick. I did not want to applaud it. I stood to one side & thought, What it’s time for is a garden. Or a croissant factory. What kind of work do I need to be doing? My parents said: Doctor, married to lawyer. The faucet said: […]
1. I was 13 & it was night & without even knowing it, I had successfully evaded the Amherst police for 4, 5 hours. It was night & without having committed any crimes, I was pursued, looked into by the Amherst police. Well, perhaps I’d trespassed: scrambled up a […]
The trees, a madness of white & wind, we, a madness of sweat & rope, ropes of semen lassoing each other, closer— our competing, conspiring tongues, nipples, armpits, the terribly neglected inside bits of our elbows, which we’ve dubbed “bowpits,” & kiss. & my mind sometimes wanders during, but it’s OK, I’m thinking […]
Maybe the centipede in the cellar knows with its many disgusting legs why I am sad. No one else does. I want to be a sweetheart in every moment, full of goats & xylophones, as charming as a hill with a small village on it. I want to be a village full of sweethearts, as […]
The birds insist on pecking the wooded dark. The wooded dark pecks back. It is time to show the universe what you are capable of, says my horoscope, increasingly insistent this month. But what I am capable of is staring at the salt accident on the coffee table & thinking, What sad salt. I […]