Books Noted
Ken Chen, Juvenilia

Yale University Press, 2010

Varied and anything but formally conventional, the poems in Ken Chen's Juvenilia convey a kaleidoscopic intelligence. Poems explore communication, family, and heartbreak in various narrative frameworks: dream, argument, novella, letter, monologue. Chen's child- and adult-self are examined from every angle, especially as reflected by other important characters, primarily the speaker's parents and his former lover. In "Love is like tautology in the same way like is like tautology," Chen writes:

The rhetoric of Chen's previous occupation as a lawyer resonates in these emotional poems, which often employ systems of logic to understand patterns, feelings, people. Yet, as Louise Glück notes in the book's introduction, Chen is fixated on "the defects of this process: logic, which is synthetic, cannot substitute for knowledge; the passion invested in logic mirrors the voids and gaps of memory—the more crucial the gaps, the more passionate the stake in logic." These gaps, blurs, and breakdowns in memory, narrative, and understanding juxtaposed with moments of communion punctuate this multi-textured, felt collection.