The 8th House

"I am the Midas/ of slop," writes Chen in the long poem that opens her follow-up to 2012's Butcher's Tree. Chen loads this poem with mythology and oneiric symbolism, but the surreality of both is rooted in real-world muck and mire: "the wine of my water tastes like menstrual copper." More fascinating than the half-hidden mythos is Chen's sense of line itself, which often breaks free of syntactic control and defies sense-making: "In the stew, cinnamon scrolls curl the anise stars haul the dark brown taste through the meat." Chen finds a stunning and more unwieldy pitch when she moves away from the long poem, allowing her shorter poems to echo, ricochet, and burst out of the silence surrounding them. "What can I stand?" she asks in one of the book's breakaway poems. Yet as quickly as she inhabits one meaning of a verb, Chen answers herself using another. "I stand for the ones who are lying down," she writes, "I stand/ for my asexual thunder." What marks Chen as an endlessly interesting poet is the roil of self-chaos, outrage, and perversity that lands on the page with every pass. As she put it, "I want to have a life so I look and become/ a betrayer of the animal in us." (Jan.)