Chen Chen's A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize-winning collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is on Boston Review's newly released list of "Summer Poetry Reading."

In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family—the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes—all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one’s own path in identity, life, and love.

According to Calista McRae, "This rangy book makes room for the sensual, the prosaic, and the quietly weird, but talkiness is not its most salient quality. These pages admit the palpable silence of white space . . . Many bring out the sharp ache of parental rejection, an injury so fresh as to seem not yet wholly registered. But the poems that foreground pain also document the heady, fleetingly quotidian. Chen notices the ordinary even in his dreams: an old, Whitmanesque bearded man holding an ice-cream cone and wearing a 'look, not of joy but impatience, like him & ice cream / got a meeting, got other hims & ice creams to see.'"

Click here to see Boston Review's full list of "Summer Poetry Reading."

For more about When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, visit the BOA Bookstore. 

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