Perennial Counterpart

Chen’s crystalline debut explores memory, nostalgia, and identity in poems that jump-cut between locations—Barcelona, Berlin, Ithaca, New York City—as well as “a sequence of past selves lined up, each next to a river of identifications” (“Macerations”). “I thought I had failed, in my life, to make my fear understood,” Chen writes, and their poems are an attempt to make their fear—and their identity—understood, even at the risk of fulfilling the book’s opening lines, “unintelligible to the end. To the end,/ unintelligible.” While there is some tonal and syntactical monotony across the collection, the poems do a good job balancing vivid scenes, storytelling, and reflection. In “Self-Portrait at 26,” Chen outlines their hope that “all of life will go here. It will make it whole into the poem,” including, as they explain in “Chryselephantine, Conviction,” life’s inevitable contradictions: “I// don’t know the relationship// between the possible and the impossible but I know they have to come into contact. Commune.” Readers will savor this strong and cerebral study of selfhood. (Apr.)