Frances Chung's poetry stands alone as the most perceptive, aesthetically accomplished, and compassionate depiction of a supposedly impenetrable community during the late 1960s and 70s. Written "For the Chinatown People" and imprinted with Chung's own ink seal, Crazy Melon collects brief poems and prose vignettes set in New York's Chinatown and Lower East Side. Chung incorporates Spanish and Chinese into her English in deft evocations of these neighborhoods' streets, fantasies, commerce, and toil. The title of her second collection, Chinese Apple, translates the Chinese word for pomegranate: there she offers "small crimson bites" of new themes and cityscapes -- delightfully understated eroticism, tributes to other poets, impressions of other Chinese diasporic communities during her travels in Central America and Asia. Its new formal experiments show that Chung's poetic prowess continued to deepen before her early death. Publication of these two works will finally allow Chung's growing circle of admirers to experience the full range of her skills and sensibility, and will draw many others into that circle.

Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple: The Poems of Frances Chung (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Chung, Frances

Lew, Walter

Poetry

Wesleyan University Press

Frances Chung's poetry stands alone as the most perceptive, aesthetically accomplished, and compassionate depiction of a supposedly impenetrable community during the late 1960s and 70s. Written "For the Chinatown People" and imprinted with Chung's own ink seal, Crazy Melon is collects brief poems and prose vignettes set in New York's Chinatown and Lower East Side. Chung incorporates Spanish and Chinese into her English in deft evocations of these neighborhoods' streets, fantasies, commerce, and toil. The title of her second collection, Chinese Apple, translates the Chinese word for pomegranate: there she offers "small crimson bites" of new themes and cityscapes ― delightfully understated eroticism, tributes to other poets, impressions of other Chinese diasporic communities during her travels in Central America and Asia. Its new formal experiments show that Chung's poetic prowess continued to deepen before her early death. Publication of these two works will finally allow Chung's growing circle of admirers to experience the full range of her skills and sensibility, and will draw many others into that circle. Her poems are an inimitable synthesis of American urban vernacular and imagery, various East Asian and Spanish-language poetics, and a concern for ethnic and feminist cultural and political survival-in-writing that was so vital to American poets around the time that Chung first began to compose. Her always fresh perspective on the worlds around her smoothly shifts through multiple lenses, making wonderful use of her "power to dream in four languages."

Book by Ames, Elizabeth, Auslander, Bonnie, Cox, Sarah Anne, Hofer Jen, Fraser, Kathleen, Conoley ,Gillian, Caton, Robin, Going, Dale, Campo, Rafael, MacLow, Jackson, Kim, Byron, Kelly, Robert, Irby, Kenneth, Vita, Tricia, Hurston, Zora Neale, Hollander, Benjamin, Taruho, Inagaki, Miller, David, Murphy, Michelle, Murray, Aife, Newman, Denise, Owen, Maureen, Quartermain, Meredith, Marlis, Stefanie, West, Alice, Mozur, Nancy, Lew, Walter, Robles, Jaime, Ewing, Renata, Norton, Linda, Roether, Barbara

Beginnings, Birth/Rebirth, and the New World (Five Fingers Review 17)

HUrston, Zora Neale

Campo, Rafael

Irby, Kenneth

Ames, Elizabeth

FRASER, Kathleen

Miller,David

Owen, Maureen

Murphy, Michelle

Kelly, Robert

Hofer, Jen

Newman, Denise

Norton, Linda

Robles, Jaime

Marlis, Stefanie

Auslander, Bonnie

Cox, Sarah Anne

Caton, Robin

GOING, Dale

MacLow, Jackson

Kim, Byron

Vita, Tricia

Hollander, Benjamin

Taruho, Inagaki

Murray, Aife

Quartermain, Meredith

West, Alice

Mozur, Nancy

Ewing, Renata

Roether, Barbara

Conoley, Gillian

Five Fingers Pr

Grouped in 19 poetic “zones” ranging from “Neo-Orientalist Deconstructions” to “Homoerotic Poetry,” this anthology includes work from 73 poets, juxtaposing them in ways that both echo and subvert categories of theme, poetics and identity, and with a particular focus on poetry that interacts with other media. Contributors include veteran authors like Jessica Hagedorn, Lawson Fusao Inada and Kimiko Hahn, as well as new poets like R. Zamora Linmark, Barry Masuda, Evelyn Lau and Amitava Kumar, and an emerging generation of Vietnamese-American and Korean-American poets. Premonitions is the most comprehensive anthology of Asian North American poetry to date.

Premonitions : The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry

Kaya/Muae

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Books by Lew, Walter