Review | A Portrait of the Self as Nation: poet Marilyn Chin’s greatest hits for ‘wild-girl’ Chinese Americans
Drawn from a prodigious career of poetry and advocacy, A Portrait of the Self as Nation is a masterclass in formal play, allusion and wit
A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems by Marilyn Chin, W.W. Norton, 2018
A Portrait of the Self as Nation brings together Marilyn Chin’s poems from her first volume, in 1987, to the present. It is both an overview and, as she notes in her preface, “best hits” – and what hits they are. Drawn from a prodigious career of poetry and advocacy, the book is a poem-by-poem, line-by-line, image-by-image masterclass in formal play, allusion and wit.
Every poet creates her reader and as Chin told Los Angeles Review of Books interviewer Irene Hsiao: “I write for a wild-girl Chinese-American poet-scholar-reader-weird brainiac like you. Why not write for the best possible reader – the most informed and enthusiastic reader – one who loves poetry from a variety of traditions?”
Chin names her early, imagistic influences as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Near the visceral opening of Repulse Bay: Hong Kong Summer 1980:
I saw a mussel hang
On a shell’s hinge: the sun
