Juvenilia

About the Author Ken Chen is the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. His work has been published or recognized in Best American Essays 2006, Best American Essays 2007, and The Boston Review of Books. A graduate of Yale Law School, he lives in Brooklyn, NY. Product Description Ken Chen is the 2009 winner of the annual Yale Younger Poets competition. These poems of maturation chronicle the poet’s relationship with his immigrant family and his unknowing attempt to recapture the unity of youth through comically doomed love affairs that evaporate before they start. Hungrily eclectic, the wry and emotionally piercing poems in this collection steal the forms of the shooting script, blues song, novel, memoir, essay, logical disputation, aphorism—even classical Chinese poetry in translation. But as contest judge Louise Glück notes in her foreword, “The miracle of this book is the degree to which Ken Chen manages to be both exhilaratingly modern (anti-catharsis, anti-epiphany) while at the same time never losing his attachment to voice, and the implicit claims of voice: these are poems of intense feeling. . . . Like only the best poets, Ken Chen makes with his voice a new category.” Review "Juvenilia is a wonderful debut, simultaneously devastating and beautiful."--Rigoberto Gonzalez, The Poetry Foundation"Chen is 'experimental' in the best and broadest sense of the term: each new page brings an experiment in self-presentation... [Chen] deserves attention for his daring invention, for [his] heretofore unknown hybrids." --Publishers WeeklyIn his award-winning debut, Ken Chen draws on techniques from filmmaking... irresistible, strange and swift in its movements... funny and deadpan... Juvenilia is an inventive exploration of identity in transition. --Karen Rigby, Raintaxi"I cannot think of another young poet who writes so palpably, ingenuously about love." --Ron Slate, author of The Incentive of the Maggot, The Quarterly ConversationFresh and intelligent... assemblage of disjointed narratives, syllogisms, aphorisms... Somber yet playful, self-disparaging yet hopeful... Poetry becomes a way through both loss and revival. --Abigail Licad, Hyphen Magazine"These are the poems of intense feeling; they have isolated and dramatized the profound dilemma of the adult’s relation to childhood in poems of riveting intelligence and sharp wit and austere beauty. Like only the best poets, Ken Chen makes with his voice a new category."—Louise Gluck, from the Foreword (Louise Gluck )