Lambda Literary Review by Jason Schneiderman

Ching-In Chen’s debut collection of poems is a sprawling and ambitious work …. I found myself admiring the book for being so satisfyingly messy, for allowing itself to sprawl and digress and experiment and explore …. I’m always glad to see identity politics become nuanced, rather than abandoned, ”since our differences don’t go away, they just get more complicated. The book presents identity as being uncontainable, with permeable boundaries, ”sexuality rubs up against nationality, ethnicity, gender, generation and many other categories. We can’t return to a easy ideas of who we are, and if there’s one thing that Chen avoids, it’s easy ideas.