Shiny City

Ching-In Chen's Shiny City examines the "real" and imagined history of Riverside, California's Chinatown, juxtaposed with a speculative shiny city of the global future. Word by word, syntax by syntax, Chen projects the essential and unrecorded voices of the Chinese immigrants who picked and packed fruit in Riverside's citrus groves and worked as house servants in the late 1800's through the 1930's, as well as the travelers and inhabitants of "shiny city" as they navigate its accelerated process of growth and decay. Both experimental and narrative, these poems juxtapose found texts with a singular kind of imagining: through a wild love, and despite an incomplete and fragmented archive, Shiny City reconstructs its own kind of history with beauty that emerges from between the cracks.

"Ching-In Chen's poetic exploration of the history of the Chinese diaspora offers a powerful addition to the tradition of documentary poetics, which directly incorporates material from historical documents in order to plumb the depths of historical experience. Like the most important work in the field, Chen's poetry does not just represent the historical record but critically interrogates it. In Shiny City we encounter figures familiar from the history of Chinese immigration to the U.S.: the houseboy, the miner, the laborer, the cook. Yet Chen presents these figures to the reader in a fractured formal landscape that renders them strange and new."

- Timothy Yu, author of 100 Chinese Silences

"In what universe is Love its own spill of bedazzled-grit & cultural archives? Shiny City. Every poem is breath, is a sound, is a meditation-past & present, ancient & new skinned. Bruised & perfect."

- Anastacia-Reneé, author of Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere