The Asian Reporter's
BOOK REVIEWS

Edited by Victoria Chang

Foreword by Marilyn Chin

University of Illinois Press, 2004

Paperback, 200 pages, $20.00

By Dave Johnson

In her Foreword to Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, Marilyn Chin says she is "pass[ing] the torch as a symbolic gesture" to a new collection of fresh voices whose identities are "multitudinous, multi-layered, and polyphonic."

It is this exciting diversity that sets the new anthology apart from earlier writings by Asian Americans who have eloquently recorded the struggle for assimilation, the deep veins of racism in the "New Land," and internal conflicts over identity. Many of these new poems actually transcend these themes to rampage or waltz across the boundaries of language, form, and internal landscapes as well as capture what it’s like to be ethnically tied to China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indochina.

In other, often startling, words, these "young Turks" are creating lively and lyrical poetry that doesn’t define them as Asian-American poets but as deft, flamboyant, evocative, and quirky explorers choosing their own pathways into the literary wilderness.

In the Introduction, Victoria Chang provides a historical perspective for this new cohort of scribblers. She reaches back to the 1890s when Sadachi Hartmann wrote Symbolist poetry and Yone Noguchi published Imagist poems in English. Chang then pays tribute to poets Lawson Inada, Jessica Hagedorn, and Joy Kagawa, who were publishing in the 1960s, and moves on to the first generation of Asian-American poets to receive widespread recognition. This group includes Li-Young Lee, Garrett Hongo, Ai, John Yau, and Marilyn Chin.

Four lines from Chin’s poem, "How I Got That Name" sums up the tenor and tone of Asian American poetry at that time:

Although the new generation continues to examine the themes of alienation and exile, it is also noted for its jubilant disregard of proper grammar or poetics. Chin explains that these new kids on the block use style "as a domain for innovation, experimenting with language, the line and white space, the stanza, rhyme, form and syntax." While continuing to honor their cultural legacy, they are not obsessed with sustaining a recognizable "Asian voice." Here are a few samples from this new generation —

Oliver de la Paz, born in Manila and raised in Ontario, Oregon, offers this comic, edgy prose poem:

Mong-Lan, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1975 to escape the political disorder of Saigon, has won numerous awards for shimmering poetry that resonates with the feverish surrealism of Arthur Rimbaud:

Lee Ann Roripaugh’s first volume of poetry, Beyond Hart Mountain, was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. In the first segment of "Transplanting," a poem dedicated to "my mother, Yoshiko Horikoshi Roripaugh," she blends the haunting beauty of this life and the spooky regulations of a bureaucracy nervous about its border crossings: