 The Heart's Traffic
(Arktoi Press, 2009)
by Ching-In Chen
Released February 15, 2009
120 pages/$21.00
This novel-in-poems chronicles the life of Xiaomei, an immigrant girl haunted by the death of her best friend. Told through a kaleidoscopic braid of stories, letters, and riddles, this stunning debut collection follows Xiaomei's life as she grows into her sexuality and searches for a way to deal with her complicated histories.
At times, meditation, celebration, investigation, and elegy, this is a book about personal transformation within the context of a family forced to make do-a Makeshift Family-and how one might create new language to name the New World.
About the Author
Ching-In Chen is a poet and multi-genre, border-crossing writer. She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and a Kundiman Asian American Poet Fellow. A community organizer, she has worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Boston, as well as helped organize the third national Asian Pacific American Spoken Word and Poetry Summit in Boston. Ching-In is also the co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Partner Abuse in Activist Communities. Ching-In Chen's poetry has been featured at poetry readings across the country, including Poets Against Rape, Word from the Streets, and APAture Arts Festival: A Window on the Art of Young Asian Pacific Americans. Her work has been published in the anthology Growing Up Girl: Voices from Marginalized Spaces and journals such as Tea Party, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and OCHO. Her poems are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, Water~Stone Review, and the anthology Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves. She has won an Oscar Wilde honorable mention for "Two River Girls," a poem from The Heart's Traffic. Her poem-play "The Geisha Author Interviews," also from The Heart's Traffic, was nominated for a John Cauble Short Play Award and recommended for development at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Ching-In has also been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Voices of Our Nations Foundation, Soul Mountain Retreat, Vermont Studio Center, and the Paden Institute.
A graduate of Tufts University, Ching-In Chen currently lives in Riverside, CA, where she is in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of California Riverside. For more info, go to www.chinginchen.com
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