Mouth

by Lisa Chen

85pp | 2007 | Paperback | ISBN 9781885030436

Mouth, Lisa Chen’s debut collection of poetry, travels from parachute girls in Millbrae to Ezequiel the murderer at a border town, creating a cartography of geographic and bodily landscapes whose distances are measured by languages. As if wandering from place to place, Chen dabbles in different poetic forms, but always, words here confuse and betray, mouths eat and are eaten. Mouth is an elegiac love song to the mundane horrors of loss – genocide, heartbreak, revolution, exile. Yet, like Diane Arbus’ photos, Chen’s poems exude a mix of humor and pleasure, highlighting beauty in the perverse, and the perverse in the everyday. She gives voice to things that occur below the level of hearing or just beyond our notice—fragments of translated stories, unanswered bits of conversations, the mute assertiveness of a room.

praise

“This book is wild, playful, gorgeous, weird, often hip. Reading it, I kept thinking, I wish I had come up with this phrase, this line, that entire poem, and that one, and that one, and that one…”
— Linh Dinh, author of Jam Alerts

“I looked up once, a big redtailed hawk swooping overhead, the wind it was riding ruffling feathers along the edge of its wing. Lisa Chen’s poetry pleases and astonishes me with that display of thrilling senses—other spirits appear unexpectedly in hovering bright mid-air, ordinal forces and natural realities indexed at play in the moment, articulated in rapt intelligence of language. Flashy and eerie, ordinate and inordinate, I am grateful Mouth startles with soulful complexity, Lisa Chen opening the verbal moment into fluent, quick gesture.”
— Sesshu Foster, author of Atomik Aztex

awards

Winner, Association of Asian American Studies Poetry Book Award