Gutted

by Justin Chin

“At his most flippant, Chin is downright charming.”— Publishers Weekly While trying to make sense of this ever-churning, terror-filled world, poet Justin Chin found himself traveling repeatedly home to Southeast Asia—a region unnerved and raging with SARS and the Avian Flu—to help care for his father who had suddenly been declared terminally ill with cancer. In addition to his father’s illness, Chin was managing his own health and medical annoyances and preparing for a looming US citizenship test. At the beginning of this difficult period, Chin quietly vowed not to speak publicly about his troubles until they had been suitably resolved. These poems mark the end of that resolution. Gutted is a document of growing older—a massively moving work of grief, loss, comfort, illness, and resolve—imbued with Chin's unique screwy perspective, ever-defective grace, and scabrous humor. Justin Chin is the author of two poetry collections, Harmless Medicine and Bite Hard (Manic D Press), and two collections of essays, Burden of Ashes (Alyson Books) and Essays, Diatribes and Pranks (St. Martin's Press). Chin’s writings have also been anthologized widely, notably in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder's Mouth Press), American The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press), The World In Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave (St. Martin's Press), and Chick For A Day (Simon & Schuster). He has performed his work throughout the United States. He lives in San Francisco.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer

144 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2006

About the author

Born in Malaysia, raised & educated in Singapore, shipped to the U.S. by way of Hawaii, and lived in San Francisco. Author of 3 books of poetry, all published by Manic D Press: Bite Hard (1997); Harmless Medicine (2001), a finalist in the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Awards; and, Gutted (2006), which received the 2007 Thom Gunn Award for Poetry by the Publishing Triangle. Squeezed in between these were 2 non-fictions: Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes & Pranks (St. Martins, 1999), and the ur-memoir, Burden of Ashes (Alyson Publications, 2002).


In the nineties, also led a double life as performance artist: created and presented seven full-length solo works here, there and where ever. Packed up those cookies in 2002, (with occasional relapses) and the documents, scripts, and what-heck from that period was published in Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2005). Continues to produce text/visual Book-based performance work. Book 2 is an on-going project where discarded or abandoned books found on the streets & other public places are remade, remodeled, & reworked into artists books.

Reviews

[Charlie Anders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's what I wrote about this book back in the day... "If any of your friends have ever struggled with loss — or if they just think monkeys using ibooks are funny — then give them some kick-ass poetry, Gutted by Justin Chin. If you really loved your loved ones, you'd buy them the whole Chin oeuvre. But Gutted is a perfect gift by itself. Chin documents his father's death from cancer and his own medical problems with such amazing warmth and playfulness that the moments of sudden horror and loss become a hundred times sadder. His poetic vehicle veers madly from pop culture humor to pure grief, but his voice is so steady you won't fall out on the sharp turns."

[theperksofbeingmarissa ;) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 rounded up! Beautiful prose!

[J. Z. Kelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of poems Justin Chin wrote about caring for his father while and after his father died of cancer, about facing his own impending (and early, he was only 46) death, about the far-right nationalism of the early 2000s, and about the SARS and avian flu epidemics. It's eerie how it feels like it could have been written in 2020 or in 2025, and how Chin is very aware that it will continue to feel timely:

And if truth be told,
the times we live in have always been
the times lived in.
That old cliche about
not learning from history and thus repeating it.
If only there was agreement in the lesson plan,
standardized testing.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
The history of the world, in all its orbit seasons of social order and disorder,
is an ever slow gathering of dark forces
that emanates from our blooded meridians,

and it is our light, our essential dignity,
that we believe better and otherwise.

Cue the reruns; The remakes are playing
louder and on a higher rota.

Heartbreaking, haunting, funny like the joke you tell after a funeral when you've been up for 27 hours and your eyes are still scratchy from crying.

[Shelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed discovering the zuihitsu form in this book.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excerpt of my review of Gutted at Galatea Resurrects #4:

Grief is accurate. Grief is not accurate.
Do you want to know the facts or do you want
the details?

Justin Chin’s third poetry collection, Gutted, which is dedicated to the memory of Chin’s father, Dr. Chin Jeck Soon, is comprised of poems conveying a son’s exhaustion as he comes to terms with his father’s terminal illness, and his own illness, in which the death process, and the process of grieving are public and participatory. These poems are unadorned, honest, and gritty, and as a result, Chin manages not to manipulate or force the reader to pity for either the loss of the father, or his own looming death.

Formalistically and emotionally, Chin’s poems move between the rigorous and disciplined, the fragmented, and the sprawling and chaotic. He begins with a ghazal, “Tonight again,” in which the end rhyme of each couplet’s second line serves as a refrain or litany, indicating resignation to a cycle of lamentable situations in which the grieving individual is stuck:

I’m slipping down the barrel of this pigpen.
Looks like it’s bareback again tonight.

[…]

Under all the sand in the Sahara, all the fossils melting into oil.
How can these bones lay down their arms afield again tonight?

[…]
My spectacular failures, my holy spooks, my brilliant bugaboos.
Hold on, little boy, you’re going to bruise like heck again tonight.


There are the individual crises which the speaker has brought upon himself, and then there is the geopolitical; the speaker is subjected to both of these contexts simultaneously, almost indifferent to those things which continue to bring him harm: “Blah blah blah, over and over, again and again, again tonight.” In this way, he is inconsequential. Throughout Gutted, navigating the private and the public, the speaker runs the risk of becoming inconsequential, as in the untitled poem about the one monkey who’s called in sick, one of “a thousand and one / monkeys pounding / away at one thousand / and one iMacs.” It seems so silly, but consider that amid the dull and incessant noise of trendy and cute technology, individuals, barely valued for their work, are dehumanized.

A note on the forms tells us that Chin utilizes a loose variation of the Japanese zuihitsu, “diary entries, lists, quotations, observations, commentaries, fragments,” and this mirrors that emotional range of the son experiencing the father’s terminal illness and the grieving process which is realistically muddled, disordered, and rough. Chin presents us with various fragmented ironies and absurdities, language and concepts his speaker just cannot make sense of while in this prolonged emotionally vulnerable state. In “(Petit Mal),” he writes, “A little evil, a small illness. Why does it sound like a pastry?” And after actually witnessing a petit mal (seizure), “Small is relative. / Illness all.” The L-consonance of this poem underscores the unapt lightness of the word, “petit mal.” Also inappropriate in this time is pharmaceutical language: “Suicidal ideation… Medicine to cure will do this. / Irony? or HMO?” We wonder if it the medicine which causes the suicidal ideation, when we hold such faith that medicine ought to “cure” this. Instead, we find an insert of a Schering Corporation pharmaceutical drug package:

“…may cause patient to develop mood or behavioral problems. These can include irritability (getting easily upset) and depression (feeling low, feeling bad about yourself, or feeling hopeless). … Some patients think about hurting or killing themselves or other people and some have killed (suicide) or hurt themselves or others.”

Read the rest here:http://galatearesurrection4.blogspot....

[Jason Alley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chin's book is a collection of poems/dreams/recollections/musings occasioned by the death of his father due to terminal illness. I delved into this book last December as I was looking for narratives on/about grief. Though Joan Didion's "Year of Magical Thinking" has received more literary attention and captures the surreal qualities of an unexpected passing, in my mind Chin cuts to the bone in rendering the dying of a loved one/parent. Both poetic and (un)sentimental, written with the characteristic blend of sadness and sarcasm that is Chin's trademark, this little book strikes lightning.

[Eric Shaffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice work, unusual approach, good lines: this book is a fine one. I recommend jumping wildly through the book trying to figure out where one poem ends and another begins. That exercise sharpens the attention you need to appreciate the larger arcs of connection between the works. Enjoy.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 C5391 2006