Turn by Wendy Chin-Tanner

Turn Reviews

• 
  Jenna

  [Note: This review first appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of Pleaides.]
  
  Portland-based poet’s Wendy Chin-Tanner’s debut collection Turn was published this March by Sibling Rivalry Press. This was something of a long-awaited event: Chin-Tanner has been a presence on the literary scene for many years now, both as a poet and as an editor of literary magazines [reviewer’s disclosure: my writing has been published by The Nervous Breakdown and Kin Poetry Journal, two of the magazines Chin-Tanner edits].
  
  Chin-Tanner’s poetry is difficult to classify. Although she tends to write in a conversational sort of free verse, Chin-Tanner’s name is often associated with formalist circles, and her poems can sometimes be seen in formalist-leaning magazines such as The Raintown Review. Although her writing appears to draw heavily from autobiographical incidents and she has been affiliated in the past with Asian-American magazines such as Lantern Review, she defies prevailing stereotypes about “ethnic” poets, and Turn is hardly your usual Asian-American memoir in verse (if such a thing exists, which is doubtful).
  
  “Tempest,” the first poem in this confident debut collection, is a bewitching verse narrative about―what else?―witchcraft. Not by accident, the poem shares its title with a Shakespeare play about sorcery, and it is divided into 13 sections, a number that evokes connotations of superstition and dark magic. The poem revolves around a young girl’s many-layered relationship with her maternal grandmother, a woman who commands awe by means of her femininity, fertility, and fluency in Chinese folk medicine:
  
  She is sweeping the front stoop of the Dutch House
  with crablike steps, short legs bowed from the births
  of seven children… (p. 6)
  
  She speaks gently, then mixes a poultice, Prospero
  grinding dried medicinal bees together
  with a foul-smelling herb steeped in bitter wine (p.8).
  
  By substituting a Chinese-American grandmother for the Italian-born male sorcerer at the heart of Shakespeare’s play, Chin-Tanner forces readers to question their deepest assumptions about culture and gender. However, the poem offers no easy answers, no clear dichotomy between good and evil. The speaker’s grandmother is depicted as neither a “good witch” nor a “bad witch,” but as a morally ambiguous character who causes violence to be inflicted on her granddaughter and then swoops in to rescue her from the violence:
  
  One morning, there is a fuss: Mother
  beats my legs with the bamboo handle
  of the feather duster and I run.
  [Grandmother] follows me, silently waving Mother away,
  and soothes me…
  
  ...though she’d urged Mother
  to do it, for my own good, she says, so
  I would not become a monster (p. 7).
  
  By the end of the poem, Chin-Tanner’s readers have come to see the speaker’s grandmother as a complex and flawed human being, the product of the mixed cultural forces that shaped her. Though she sets an example of strong femininity for her granddaughter, she is nonetheless complicit in the patriarchal social system that produced her, a social system in which girl-children feel themselves to be “unwanted”:
  
  ...I,
  the only daughter of the second unwanted girl,
  watch the passing cars splash the puddle
  always lingering at the curb (p. 6).
  
  The themes introduced in “Tempest”―fraught family relationships, patriarchal violence, and smoldering feminist anger―recur obsessively throughout Turn. The undercurrent of bitterness and periodic flashes of fury found in Chin-Tanner’s poems are reminiscent of another feminist poet, Sylvia Plath. The spiritual kinship between Chin-Tanner and Plath is most evident in the lyric “Persimmons on Sunday,” whose premise mirrors that of Plath’s celebrated poem “Cut”:
  
  ...the knife
  I’m not supposed to touch
  glides through the flesh,
  so fast that it slices without thought
  into my four extended fingertips (p. 27).
  
  The ensuing suite of poems about pregnancy, childbirth, and early parenthood is also Plath-esque, especially “Through the Bathroom Door,” a poem about a young mother who throws herself into family life in an effort to stave off depression (”the tempest in my head,” Chin-Tanner terms it (p. 40), using a phrase that harkens back to the first, and strongest, poem in the collection). The boisterous, almost humorously vulgar language in this middle section of the book (“the confetti from your / cock burst, a shower, a tickertape parade” (p. 38)) also bears similarities to the no-holds-barred verse of Sharon Olds.
  
  After a series of emotionally naked poems documenting the experience of mothering a young daughter through childhood’s milestones, Chin-Tanner changes tack completely, concluding this book with a set of solemn poems on the topics of old age and death. The majority of these poems end on the life-affirming note that we have come to expect from poetry on these subjects. Even when she is declaiming in rather abstract terms about love and futurity, however, Chin-Tanner never strays into mawkishness or inauthenticity. It is her warm emotional honesty, her faithfulness to specifics, and her keen ear for voices and dialogue that keep this book afloat to the very end.
• 
  Gerry LaFemina

  Wendy Chin-Tanner's first collection has some of the usual subject matter: childhood trauma, childbirth, death of family, that we've come to expect from the American Lyric poet, but they feel fresh in her sincere smart voice. Where so many young poets are working on their projects, Chin-Tanner is writing poems, and very fine ones at that.
• 
  Amy

  I love each poem deeply.
  
  “... I am the child of milk, eggs,
  and avoiding dark foods
  during pregnancy.”
  
  Chin-Tanner’s reimaginings of Mulan, Joan of Arc, Persephone- nourish my heart and mind.
  
  “When You Open It To Speak,” “Signs and Symbols,” and “Wake” may be my favorites. For now. That may change with time and rereads.
• 
  Joe

  5 stars if just for "I Could Not Forgive You," the first lines of which "For walking under the same sky / and sleeping on the same earth," which shouldn't work but it does and the poem keeps playing with the impossible. // Got this at a reading in Albany, 2018? The usual snail's pace getting to and through it.
• 
  Barton Smock

  this book of poetry has what seems to be a hard-won ease about it. stories that were, there, before we were told and then the afterimage of the telling. I like that it's not playful. that I can go back to it and know my own surprise has gone untouched. it's a loyal book.
• 
  Edie Kestenbaum

  The poems are simple but I liked them, especially the one about persimmons.