Leaving Biddle City

by Marianne Chan

A brand new collection from award-winning poet Marianne Chan. 


 A coming-of-age narrative, Leaving Biddle City details one Filipina American speaker’s experience of growing up amid a white, Midwestern suburbia mythologized as “Biddle City.” Through prose poems, pantoums, ballads, flattened haikus, and thematic autobiographies, Chan maps a territory of intergenerational conflict, racial alienation, and memory and forgetfulness. What’s achieved is a work of play and meticulous beauty, a collection that reframes how we may understand ourselves, our histories, and the places where we are from.

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 30, 2024

Reviews

[pennpenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5

• oh my god this was fantastic from start to finish
• Chan’s writing is so honest, intimate, and tender, and she captures suburban malaise and late 90s/early 2000s nostalgia so well.
• Chan experiments with form in really creative ways!
• the use of Biddle City as a setting and device to explore immigration, assimilation, coming of age in a predominantly white Midwestern city, and the American Dream??? Ms. Marianne Chan your brain >>>

My favorite poems!:
• “Winter Flowers in Biddle City”
• “The Shape of Biddle City”
• “The World Buffet”
• “Midwestern Ghost Ballad”
• “Summer in Biddle City, 1999”
• “Summer in Biddle City, 2000”
• “Biddle City Filipina, No. 2”
• “Let’s Talk for a Moment”
• “The Children”

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had the chance to meet Chan this weekend at Barrelhouse.

This collection is a myth remaking. Remixing traditional forms such as the pantoum, haiku, sprung rhythm, and haibun, Chan remakes the city she grew up in. I’m deeply compelling by how the tension between formal constrains, and original stories compelled language forward in this collection.

[Maggie Dunleavy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Touching, personal, and illuminating. I really loved the second half especially!

[James Joseph Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Marianne Chan’s latest collection of poetry. An exiting departure from her first book, All Heathens, these poems create a lyrical autobiography that feels astonishingly personal and intimate. They take on several shapes, both in form and theme, representing the flatness of a gray Midwestern day, the rectangular sameness of assimilated Americanness, and the round comfort of a close-knit Filipino community holding itself in a tight, circular embrace. Reading these poems feels like browsing through the family photo album of a dear friend, welcoming you to laugh and cry alongside them as they gently slip fond yet complicated memories into your pocket.

[Samantha Seybert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weeping as I write this review. Mare I hear your voice in every poem as if I’m sitting right in front of you and you’re reading this book of poems to me from a little stage, in a corner classroom in Biddle city. I don’t think there could be more beautiful to write an autobiography. I laughed, I cried my sentimental heart out, and I loved this book. It’s especially perfect on the cusp of fall, on this foggy day in Biddle city. Thank you for writing it.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I understand now. Screaming was too
loud. It drowned out all complexity. While screaming, we would,
momentarily, not hear ourselves love one another.

Everything is a rectangle in Biddle City. No triangles, no circles, not a one. No swirls, squiggles. For example, this poem is a rectangle, and outside this rectangle is a bigger rectangle, inside that rectangular room are other four-sided shapes—windows, computers, televisions, floor rugs. Even the lamps are rectangular cuboids. This is not the City of Angels, but the City of Angles, boxy, wingless, no building higher than the capitol, no person higher than the next person, everyone remaining at a level height. Even the Biddle City accent is flat-backed and angular.

Such unique imagery and humor in poems that could be so sad as the experience of immigrants in a plain, ordinary, boring town trying to find their way despite xenophobia and racism. The poet writes of her struggle to hold on to culture in a place where assimilation is the only beauty or means of survival. Perfect book of poetry.

...she responded to no one, not even the teacher, not even the principal, and she was the only other Asian girl at my school, people claimed she knew no English, but they were wrong because she was a rebel, this was silence as protest, she never said a word, except one time in seventh-grade health class, when the teacher said “Ayumi, what do you say if someone offers you drugs,” she replied “Just say no,” the words as clear as the Biddle City sky in springtime, when it unbuttons its winter shirt to reveal the sky’s bare chest: blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, and I loved the sound of her voice so much I wanted to hug her then, but she would’ve kicked me, I’d seen her kick other kids when they touched her, and I was a loser without a single friend, and she was a powerful girl, a fighter, never lowering herself, and

I loved her, really
I loved her, but I didn’t
want to be her.

[Raima Larter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't generally read poetry collections, but I heard this author read from this book at a recent conference and I was very impressed, so gave it a try. This is a wonderful collection of poems that is also, in a way, a memoir. A lot of the poems are pantoums, which I liked, but many are free verse or other forms. I also found the ordering of the poems in the three sections worked really well to provide, essentially, a narrative arc through the book.

The author has a background very different from mine (immigrant family from the Philippines growing up in the Midwest US) but the experiences she draws from have universal appeal and resonance. Highly recommend and I look forward to reading more work from this author!

[Nicole Choi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never read a book of poems before. I’m so glad this was my first. I heard Marianne Chan read at the Barrelhouse Writer’s Conference and was deeply moved by her poems, especially “Love Song for Ayumi.” I learned about the pantoum form through this book and felt inspired to try writing one. All of the poems in here are beautiful and thought-provoking while remaining accessible.

[Sarah Tollok · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marianne Chan's mastery of words is evident in every poem, no matter what structure or style she utilizes. She plays with past and present, remembering and forgetting. The characters in her poems are up close and also, somehow, perpetually occupying some liminal space of misunderstanding and mistranslation. I was repeatedly blown away, like snow down a driveway in Biddle City.

[Aether · Rating 4 out of 5]

i enjoyed this book so much. i loved the way repetition was used throughout this book both within the individual poems but through the collection as a whole. the raw humanness of this book, the memories held within shown so beautifully. i definitely need to reread this again.

[Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4/5 stars

The first part of this was extremely effective and I really enjoyed the slice of life and bittersweet nature to the poems. I especially liked her use of the pantoum structure in many of them. However, the middle part was less successful for me and the last part was 50/50. I'll definitely keep my eye out for her work in the future and can see myself revisiting many of the poems in this collection.

[Jimi Evans Remick · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful. touching. intimate. filled with poems that have shape in thought and form. some favs:

autobiography via revision
leaving biddle city
autobiography via screaming
midwestern ghost ballad

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without words, just jump into this.

[Robyn]

Notables 2024 #173

[Hildie · Rating 5 out of 5]

moving poetry collection