POETRY IN REVIEW

1 6 2 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N B U R T The word identity is a bear to define: documents proving identity show that you are uniquely you, but identity politics work on behalf of a group. An identity parade in Britain is a police lineup in America; Identity Parade is also the title for a much-attended, studiedly multicultural anthology of U.K. poets published in 2010. Starting around that year the attitude toward identities, identity politics, and group identification for U.S. poets changed: a spate of high honors for midcareer poets of color, from the National Book Award for Terrance Hayes’s Lighthead to the National Book Critics Circle and other awards for Claudia Rankine’s Citizen to the appointment of Juan Felipe Herrera as poet laureate, along with W h e n I G r o w U p I W a n t t o B e a L i s t o f F u r t h e r P o s s i b i l i t i e s , by Chen Chen (BOA Editions, 96 pp., $16 paper) C a l l i n g a W o l f a W o l f , by Kaveh Akbar (Alice James Books, 100 pp., $15.95 paper) O u r L a d y o f N o t A s k i n g W h y , by Courtney Kampa (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 98 pp., $16 paper) G i l t , by Raena Shirali (YesYes Books, 104 pp., $18 paper) A n y b o d y : P o e m s , by Ari Banias (Norton, 112 pp., $25.95) Te l e p a t h o l o g i e s , by Cortney Lamar Charleston (Saturnalia Books, 128 pp., $16 paper) T h e V i r g i n i a S t a t e C o l o n y f o r E p i l e p t i c s a n d Fe e b l e m i n d e d , by Molly McCully Brown (Persea, 80 pp., $15.95 paper) T h e W o r k - S h y , by Blunt Research Group (Wesleyan University Press, 160 pp., $24.95) 1 6 3 R obvious changes in national politics, made it much harder for whiteness to go unremarked, or seem unmarked, among white readers like me. This changing climate might have made it easier for publishers to find and promote – perhaps (who knows?) easier for the poets to finish – some of this year’s best first books, all of which say something (no two say the same thing) about how group identities and categories (those we choose, those we inherit, those imposed by schools, employers, the state) inform who we think we are, how other people see us, and who we will let ourselves be. Of all these first books Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities has the best title: it’s also the most varied and the most fun. Chen’s family came from China to Texas so that his father could study ‘‘in the graduate religion program at Texas Christian University,’’ while his mother ran a restaurant, ‘‘the grease-tang of kung pao chicken in [her] shirts.’’ During his middle school years they resettled in western Massachusetts, near Amherst, where Chen’s mother would not accept his sexuality (he’s gay). When he was thirteen, Chen tried to run away, spent the night in a tree, and broke his arm trying to run back home; the episode provides the narrative skeleton for one of Chen’s strongest poems. It might have been easy for Chen to assemble a straightforward volume about his representative experience as the child of immigrants , a book whose accessibility, or teachability, resembles that of the mentors he brings up in interviews (Martín Espada, for example ). Instead he’s done something stranger, and more playful, than any story-driven style...