[Cwgrad-announcements] I guess some people like Ching-In's new book, kinda, maybe, sort of...

[rrussin at ucr.edu]

WOW! 

Congratulations, Ching-In! 
	
Entertainment & Arts - Books & Literature
Description: 	
Forthcoming in 2009 from Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, The Heart's Traffic is Ching-In's debut collection of poems.

This novel-in-poems chronicles the life of Xiaomei, an immigrant girl haunted by the death of her best friend. Told through a kaleidoscopic braid of stories, letters, and riddles, this stunning debut collection follows Xiaomei's life as she grows into her sexuality and searches for a way to deal with her complicated histories.

At times, meditation, celebration, investigation, and elegy, this is a book about personal transformation within the context of a family forced to make do—a Makeshift Family—and how one might create new language to name the New World.

Praise for The Heart's Traffic

Ching-In Chen composes a book-length sequence that inventively incorporates such Western and Eastern forms as the sestina, villanelle, epistle, haibun, pantoum, and zuihitsu. 'A girlbirth in the flanks of the zodiac, / a gift of fossilizing heat,' she writes in this mythic, cross-cultural collection.
—Arthur Sze

At the overwhelming crossroads, where the body, sexuality, and culture collide, you will find The Heart's Traffic fibrillating with emotion and pumping forth the strained language that shudders off the tongue, 'end of the intimate and divine source.' No wonder, then, that these poems warrant such innovation of shape, direction and structure, such defiance of pleasantries and political correctness—they thrive 'objecting to the world around them.' Ching-In Chen has come out to unsettle the poetry stage with a debut collection that shimmers with fierceness and 'sunslickstarfight.'
—Rigoberto González

Ching-In destroys idioms, genres, 'crafts' and the various literary borders and orders of East/West canons. Then she re-stories (not "restores") an anti-poem made of anti-novels and anti-heroes and sheroes. I am captivated by her labyrinth voices, by Xiaomei's wicked tender wand, by Ching-In's anti- I-Chings of parable, wisdom jokes, love letters, word-tables, false self-immolations, anti-ethnographies and brutal investigations of double-heavens and double underworlds. This is brilliant super-nova bursting-bursting love and loss and mind and body and greedy-mouth-demon-sparrow spirit. A magic language sorceress power-kit. A border-breaking, time-bending, space-burning, herstory-making work. Number one, if there were numbers.
—Juan Felipe Herrera,
Author of Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems

One knows from the amazing number of modes and styles in The Heart's Traffic that Ching-In Chen is no ordinary poet. She is in fact many poets at once: a poet of wide ranging forms, a poet of resonant voices, and most significantly, a poet anchored by intensity. Shapely and wild, personal and cultural, tough and vulnerable, this is a poet and a poetry of steadfast innovation and depth.
—Terrance Hayes

Ching-In's first book, The Heart's Traffic, constructs a re-naming, a caterwaul call to arms to attend to an archipelago of hybrid identity: political, sexual, and always love-persuaded. Here the father is temporary, the mother is dead-alive and girls are writing tiger-legends through sestina, haibun, and the lost letters that must be reinvented if we can understand this new American body.
—Sarah Gambito