When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen

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 refreshingly candid and entertainingly provocative collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life and love.

Foreword by Jericho Brown.

"Chen Chen's debut collection is thoroughly of the moment, its energy devoted to explaining who Chen Chen is and how he got here. It tells the many stories that collude into identity: a mother, and a family, who cannot accept their son being gay, who blame it on their emigration, on the moral decay of the United States; a boy who grows up American, but is still seen as Chinese despite only the vaguest memories of the country and life there; a twenty-something, caught in the orbits of MFA programs, places like Brooklyn, the life of the precariat. All these are told in a fresh, playful, and often lonely voice shot through with references to high and low art, Celan and Kafka and Optimus Prime." -LA Review of Books

Paperback / 96 pages