Poetry and Prose
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Poetry and Prose
For poetry, we've selected Circle: Poems by Victoria Chang (Carbondale, IL: Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois UP: 2005). Chang addresses an ambitious range of themes including assimilation, identity, social injustice, and traditional topics of poetry such as yearning and absence. In addition, the book considers a wide range of subject positions that reflect varying and competing opinions in cultural movements and individual perspectives. The three sections portray original approaches to thinking about change, hopes, and everyday realities. We particularly liked the middle sequence, "Five Year Plan." We appreciated Chang's sense of rhythm, her eye for detail, and her ability to draw fresh metaphors from unlikely sources.
For prose, we'd like to give the nod to A Long Stay in a Distant Land: A Novel by Chieh Chieng (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005). Chieh's novel is psychologically astute and verbally nimble in its portrayal of dysfunctional families and the ways in which family members communicate, verbally and silently. In his witty, intimate portrayal of "the Lums of Orange County," a Chinese Californian clan in which the need for intimacy continually battles with the need for personal liberty, Chieh gives a fresh, contemporary, psychologically accessible voice to Chinese Americans.
We would like to give an honorable mention to Bodies in Motion: Stories by Mary Anne Mohanraj (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005). Not only is Bodies sensual, historically ambitious, deeply felt, and provocative in its embrace of a wide range of love and family stories; it is also formally innovative. In contrast [End Page 196] to a more traditional family chronicle in which the family's tale moves forward within a linear historical narrative, often associated with a transnational family's attempted assimilation into one or two nations, Mohanraj cuts backward and forward in time and across oceans to risk a new and unconventional form. In addition, it adds to a small but growing literature by and about Sri Lankan North Americans.
Patricia P. Chu is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University. She is the author of Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2000), and has published several essays in journals and edited volumes.
