Hard Love Province: Poems

by Marilyn Chin

Winner of the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Prize for PoetryFrom a poet of "dazzling longing" (Los Angeles Times), a stunning new collection of haunting elegies and playful quatrains.

Marilyn Chin is a poet acclaimed by Adrienne Rich for her "powerful, uncompromised, and unerring" poems. Dancing brilliantly between Eastern and Western forms, fusing ancient Chinese history and contemporary American popular culture, she is one of the most celebrated Asian-American poets writing today.Chin's fourth volume of poems, Hard Love Province, is composed of erotic elegies in which the speaker grieves for the loss of her beloved. In "Void" she writes with the imagistic, distilled quietude of a solitary "It’s not that you are rare / Nor are you extraordinary // O lone wren sobbing on the bodhi tree / You are simple and sincere." In "Formosan Elegy," by contrast, she is that mourner, beyond simplicity or quietude, crying out for a "I sing for you but my tears have dried in my gullet / Walk the old dog give the budgies a cool bath / Cut a tender melon let it bleed into memory."

Here, too, are poems inspired by Chin’s poetic forbearers and mentors—Dickinson, Plath, Ai, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tu Fu, Adrienne Rich, and others—honoring their work and descrying the global injustice they addressed. "Whose life is it anyway?" she asks in a poem for Rich, "She born of chrysalis and shit / Or she born of woman and pain?"

Emotionally nuanced and electric with high-flying verbal experimentation, image after image, line by line, Chin's spectacular reinventions, her quatrains, sonnets, allegories, and elegies, are unforgettable.

Genres: Poetry

67 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 9, 2014

About the author

Marilyn Chin is an award-winning poet and the author of Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty and Dwarf Bamboo. Her writing has appeared in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry.

She was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress. She was interviewed by Bill Moyers’ and featured in his PBS series The Language of Life and in PBS Poetry Everywhere.

Reviews

[Edward Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard Love Province is an engaging work of art. Marilyn Chin gives us a poetry that needs no explanation or interpretation. Her sensual phrasing punctuated by artistic use of space and line breaks allow each syllable to sink into your soul beyond the mere meaning of words. These poems seed directly to the senses where they sprout into the vivid voice of human experience.

Chin’s work is rich with allusion to American poets, but as an Asian-American firmly rooted in contemporary culture, she brings a fresh vision into the realm of American poetry, as she alludes to in a poem titled “From a Notebook of an Ex-Revolutionary” (p 44).

White picket fence
A red chicken

Ain’t my people’s imagism

These are deeply felt poems of love, of loss, of growth, of hope juxtaposed with humor. As in the classical use of tragedy and comedy, it gives a catharsis to the work, a way to transcend the unbearable. One prose poem begins with a fart and, after a turd is presented on a jade platter, ends with a beheading. Oops, spoiler alert. Not to worry, there are many gems hidden in this work that clearly show Marilyn Chin to be a very good contemporary American poet. Hard Love Province is a wonderful volume, and I look forward to more of Chin’s work.

[Jan Priddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marilyn Chin's newest poems may have ramped up the power and sting of her earlier work. The poems prod and poke and beat me about the heart. I think there is some edge to anger that I have to admire—we are so afraid of intensity, we seem to want everything to be so soft, and we want heroes to tell us how to be and what to care about. I have to admire the intensity of Chin's words. The paradox of purity and anger. "You must be suffering from poetry." What a lovely way to die.

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's amazing to me how much Chin grows with each book. I first read some of this collection in American Poetry Review and was so moved I wrote to her about it. I've been looking forward to this collection ever since (am not sure how I missed last summer's pub date).

Needless to say, it doesn't disappoint. The repetition of key images throughout gives the collected work a strange coherence--strange because the design is deliberately fragmented. And yet not. The repetition, because it is so judicious, focusing on especially powerful images or phrases, adds tonality and a hypnotic quality, like a kirtan. It meditates on pain and not just beauty or transcendence, though.

Just a few for-instances:

A mask on horseback is not your friend
A mask on horseback is not your savior

...

What is democracy but too many things
And too little time to love them

--from "Nocturnes"


White picket fence
A red chicken


Ain't my people's imagism

...


Jon Yi was born in the caves of Yenan,
Did the Long March on his mother's breast.
He grew up and became a Red Guard,
Placed a dunce cap on the very same mother,
Marched her to Xinjiang to die of hard labor.

Twenty years later in Sonoma California
He confessed to his loving wife--I'm a weakling.
A spineless scoundrel, a turtle's spawn.
A lackey, a whelp-dog. He squealed and squealed,
_History made me do it! History made me do it!_


--from From a Notebook of an Ex-Revolutionary



Black President

If a black man could be president
Could a white man be his slave?
Could a sinner enter heaven
By uttering his name?

If the terminator is my governor
Could a cowboy be my king?
When shall the cavalry enter Deadwood
And save my prince?

An exo-cannibal eats her enemies
An indo-cannibal eats her friends
I’d rather starve myself silly
Than to make amends

Blood on the altar Blood on the lamb
Blood in the chalice
Not symbolic but fresh


My favorite is Beautiful Boyfriend, but I'll let you discover that for yourselves...

[Wes Bishop · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first collection of Chin's I have ever read. There is a steady anger pulsing under the entire work, like a a stream of intense lava. Sometimes that anger burst through onto the poem. Other times it is left, hinted at and never fully addressed. The result is a small book with much emotion. For those checking this collection out, I particularly recommend the poems "Black President," "Horns: A Coda," and "Beautiful Boyfriend." Well worth reading and contemplation.

[Abigail Licad]

My review in The Critical Flame:

http://criticalflame.org/of-grievance...

[C.E. G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strikes me as a poet's poet, and I'm not a poet. But I did like a few parts, like this line:

"It's not that you are rare
Nor are you extraordinary
O lone wren sobbing on the bodhi tree
You are simple and sincere."

[Christina Borgoyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

a beautiful read.

[Angie Fehl · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 Stars

In this, her fourth volume of poetry (pub. 2014), Marilyn Chin ponders the theme of deep grief and mourning after the loss of one's beloved. She plays with the imagery of quiet moments, typically occurring during late night, moonlit hours while also exploring the sensation of simmering anger that is sometimes intertwined with grief. While in this mode, Chin also doesn't shy away from tougher material, such as the dark and morbid imagery that can play across the mind in moments of emotional fatigue. Here, almost inevitably, also comes the moments of fury & pessimism at one's chosen god.

Chin gets creative with her format, putting together a mix of haikus, standard poem form, and flash fiction. In all honesty, I didn't love her haikus and I found the bits of flash fiction odd. Strong focus on passing wind and human excrement..why?! I fared a bit better with her more standard forms of poetry, though as a whole I wasn't in love with this collection.

There were some choice lines that stood out to me as impressive, such as:

* "Something's lost, something's made strong.." from "Formosan Elegy"
* "What is democracy but too many things And too little time to love them..."
from "Nocturnes"
* "A death blow is life blow to some" ~ also from "Nocturnes"

Beyond that, there's an eroticism to the writing that I personally didn't find all that well executed. Pushed past moving & powerful imagery into just unnecessarily crude IMO. But I will give Chin a nod for her impressive collection of euphemisms for men's (and women's!) down south regions! Also, a note on the poem "Kalifornia"...umm, just read the lyrics to Red Hot Chili Peppers "Californication" -- pretty much the same idea between them only more impressive if you go the RHCP route.

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually loved these poems - it spoke to me as a poet, as a non-white woman. sexy, referential, clean , unpunishing lines. these poems resisted tokenization. Chin isn't trying to be the asian poet slot on college syllabi. i love the way she writers herself into poems, claiming her own specificity, while also not whitewashing herself. sexuality and sensuality in these poems is also captivating, surprising. i think that's my favorite part of this book - how she surprises me without punishing the reader with the difficulty of her poems. sometimes, her references can be niche (as in, expecting the reader to have read a college english degree canon), but that's true of most poets. i liked it. i really liked it.

[owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than I did. There are great poems here, mostly those in which Chin successfully reclaims the imagism or cubism of the early modernists who adopted it from the chinese, and applies it to a multifaceted illustration of social situations, but there’s also frankly a lot of cheese, and moments that are hard to take seriously for their truism. She has a good pen for repetition and sonority, but she sometimes takes it too far.
This collection hasn’t convinced me that she’s the modern Du Fu.

[Gabby Gilliam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This didn't resonate with me the way I had hoped it would. There were a few poems that struck a chord, but I found there were a lot that left me feeling very meh about the collection.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting use of space. The last section was my favorite.

[Jessica]

God, this was awful. Zero stars.

[Elley Shin · Rating 3 out of 5]

aapi month 2023 book #6

poems!! i thought some poems resonated with me and I thought were impactful, but overall fell short. i think i would try to read more. i know this is her fourth collection

[Danny · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
fav: Beautiful Boyfriend

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

yeah its poetry... some of it the best I've read since Jim Morrison left this awkward rock hurtling through space. I just don't care to read about her personal stuff. I suddenly understand Spiro Agnew and his rantings about effete intellectuals..

[Maud · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't entirely remember reading this before. Some of it I do. This book is very nice and interesting.