BABE

by Dorothy Chan

BABE is about owning the room. It’s about physical touch. It’s about dancing (actually, grinding) on a heart-shaped bed and starring as the leading lady of the film (no matter how risqué it gets). At the core of this collection, the Chinese American speaker questions the conventions around her, dating back to her origin story as a Hong Kongnese child who would get up to stretch in the middle of Cantonese class. As an adult, she questions her fate since the family fortune teller screwed her over with a lazy fortune, yet got her brother’s completely spot-on. She triple sonnets her way through confrontations of queerphobia in her family, the trauma from a past relationship with a significantly older man, and the constant male gaze. She pays homage to the first girls who ever loved her in this analysis of sexuality, queerness, popular culture, and resilience. She’s baby forever.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published December 1, 2021

About the author

Dorothy Chan is the author of Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, Forthcoming March 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). She was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Academy of American Poets, The Cincinnati Review, ​The Common, Diode Poetry Journal, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Chan is the Editor of The Southeast Review.

Reviews

[Hallie Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

glorious reminder that poetry is fun!!! formal poetry is fun!! i loved this and i loved Chan’s Return of the Chinese Femme, which i read last year. these poems are quick, personal, horny, hungry, delicious, sensitive, true. i highly recommend Dorothy Chan for both poets and non poets to pick up! very easy, fun, quick read.

[ShondaReads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dorothy Chan is a riot to read. This is her best book yet, after Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a testament to all us "immodest" girls who are told to shrink ourselves and be quiet, but we didn't and we won't. This is book is queer joy. She is the triple sonnet queen and I just can't get enough of her humor and wit.

[Ximena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dorothy Chan's triple sonnets are INCREDIBLE, and it's so refreshing to see how WOC are pushing boundaries on what a sonnet is, as (ahem: certain white women) traditionalists bore the hell of me and most of the world.

[lillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not a huge poetry person, but I had to read this book for class. Surprisingly, I really enjoyed it! A few poems stood out to me more than others, but overall I think Dorothy Chan is incredibly talented.

[Samantha Buchheit · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really don't know what to think of this poetry book. Dorothy Chan clearly has a lot of talent and Babe is very well written. I just didn't love the overall vibe of some of the poems, whereas others I really enjoyed.

[Stephanie Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dorothy excels at writing food as love language x queer Asian anger / joy and this is proof

[Simone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dorothy Chan’s poems are so gorgeously complex and luscious in terms of diction and sonic progressions that I can’t help but be excessive in describing the work. Spinning her signature form of the triple sonnet with astonishing skill, the titles themselves are monostiches: from “Love Letter to Jello Salad, Time Travel, and My Mother” to “Ode to all My Flings Who Have Hated Dim Sum” to “Girls, Girls, Girls Dancing on Tables, Eating Octopus, Thinking About Keats” to “Triple Sonnet of Botox, Massage Parlors, and Wild Animals.”

The feminist, gurlesque world of Chan’s work manages to be both molten lava and molten lava cake: dangerous, hot, decadent, and delicious. To use one of their neologisms—the poems are “odd cages of bizz-architecture.” She is a language sorceress, a Leonor Fini with a pen instead of a paintbrush, weaving dross into gold, stitching the playful to the political and the feral to the finessed. In these intricately composed tableaus, one discovers Rococo rotary phones, gender-reveal donuts, heart-shaped beds, Renaissance artists, and Ninja turtles as the poems swirl with film, food, art, sex, and culture. Chan’s latest book, Babe, examines, beneath a glittering magnifying glass, “queerphobia in her family, the trauma from a past relationship with a significantly older man, and the constant male gaze. . . in this analysis of sexuality, queerness, popular culture, and resilience.” Ultimately, Chan is a deft mixologist, delivering fire-fanged concoctions that burn, bite, and intoxicate.