FOREWORD

The charm, intention, expectancy, and wonder in the title When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities point directly to the powers particular and talents specific to Chen Chen as a poet. The greatest achievement of this book is its singular and sustained voice, poem after poem of a speaker whose obsessive and curious nature is that of an adult who refuses to give up seeing through the eyes of an adolescent, one who believes that the world is a malleable place and that asking the right questions changes its form.

The major question of this book is how to feel. What is the proper emotional response to parents who physically attack us, to friends and family who object to our work as artists, to a nation that finds subtle ways to deny our citizenship while requiring our taxes? But while those questions are germane to Chen’s writing, the answers are what make this collection a unique contribution to all of poetry. Though reasons for the quest are morbid, this is a poet who knows the journey won’t begin or end if he does not take every step in humor, the earliest poems in the book preparing us for comic delight with lines like, “I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be” and—in a meditation on the nature of God—“God sent an angel. One of his least qualified, though. Fluent only in / Lemme get back to you. The angel sounded like me, early twenties, / unpaid interning.”

In these and other poems, comedy is juxtaposed with a sense of wonder characterized by the surreal as an element of the quotidian. As Chen’s speaker meanders discursively toward wisdom, he comes upon images that lead the reader to question what we expect to see when reading poetry with lines such as, “Dreaming of one day being as fearless as a mango” and “I am making my loneliness small. So small it fits on a postcard / a baby rabbit could eat” and

My dream in the motels that my father’s scholarship

was a type of ship & soon we’d get to ride it

& reach Massachusetts, a vast

snowy island.

This last set of lines from the poem “Things Stuck in Other Things Where They Don’t Belong” is one of several examples of how every word manages a new kind of weight as each poem and the book itself progress. The uprootedness of “motels” and the transmigration of “ship” and the colonization of “Massachusetts” are a part of the skilled and seemingly childlike play that allows Chen to see the ordinary as the oddity, leading him to language where the introspective experience is made more full by becoming the site for political experiences, as in these lines from “Nature Poem”:

Earlier today, outside the cabin, the sudden deer were a supreme

headache of beauty. Don’t they know I am trying to be alone

& at peace? In theory I am alone & really I am hidden,

which is a fine temporary substitute for peace, except I still

have email, which is how I receive my horoscope, & even here

in the wooded dark I receive yet another email mistaking me

for another Chen. I add this to a folder, which also includes

emails sent to my address but addressed to Chang,

Chin, Cheung. Once, in a Starbucks, the cashier

was convinced I was Chad. Once, in a Starbucks, the cashier

did not quite finish the n on my Chen, & when my tall mocha was ready,

they called out for Cher. I preferred this by far, but began to think

the problem was Starbucks. Why can’t you see me? Why can’t I stop

needing you to see me? For someone who looks like you

to look at me, even as the coffee accident

is happening to my second favorite shirt?

This is an astounding meeting of peace with empire, of nature with technology, and of the individual with the perception others have that he couldn’t possibly be individual at all. And all of this happens in the midst of being mistaken for Cher and an attention to what magic language can make: “the sudden deer were a supreme / headache of beauty.” The poem ends in questions where, again, the speaker is most hungry to know how to be, how to feel. And of course, he won’t be satisfied with any answer until he has thoroughly reviewed every possibility, every option for becoming a more whole self in the most intimate of moments, as in “Second Thoughts on a Winter Afternoon”:

Your mother is sick & all I can think of is how sick’s

also a word for “cool,” like “ill,” though maybe “ill”

is becoming outdated, & “sick” too, & actually it’s a lie

I can only think of that, I can also think of my mother,

how your mother’s pancreatic cancer doesn’t sound

as pretty as the problem my mother has with her heart,

heartbeat, & I can even think my mother has it tougher,

though it isn’t cancer, & of course I’d think that, she’s mom,

mommy, though of course this woman is mom, mommy

to you, & mommy is very sick . . .

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is a collection that manages the meditative as well as it wields the rant, and it often achieves both of these in a single poem. This is necessary in a book where God so often gets beseeched, denied, and honored. For Chen Chen, poetry is the place where the sacred is reached through the profane, or as he writes in “Talking to God About Heaven from the Bed of a Heathen”:

I know, though, that there are believers who don’t believe

out of fear solely. They actually love you. They reach out

& receive your touch. Like a friend, like a boyfriend, like the boy

beside me, overheating, reeking of sweat . . .

It is no wonder that this book is a library of allusions to forbears including Paul Celan, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kafka, Pablo Neruda, Christopher Smart, and Georg Trakl. The formal inventiveness of these poems reflects a mind unsatisfied with easy answers, a poet preoccupied with new ways to ask questions, a very young and ambitious voice who, in the poem “Spell to Find Family,” proclaims:

My job is to trick adults

into knowing they have

hearts.

. . . My job is to trick

myself into believing

there are new ways

to find impossible honey.

This is a stunning debut and the first of what is bound to be several beautifully necessary books.

Jericho Brown

Atlanta