Anyone Will Tell You by Wendy Chin-Tanner

Anyone Will Tell You Reviews

• 
  S.C. Yung

  Hmm... this is more like a 2.5, if I'm being completely honest, but I don't want to unfairly influence the book's aggregate rating since it's just been released.
  
  I've read through this a couple of times now—it's a fairly quick read, as many of the poems are short and rather repetitive (I recognize the intent was to play with meaning in homonyms, but there are only so many ways you can reorient see/sea, etc., and the rhyming becomes a bit tiresome).
  
  Unfortunately, I found this collection pretty uneven. I definitely don't think it succeeds in fulfilling all that the description listed here promises. Yes, it engages with motherhood (and some of the technologies utilized in Chin-Tanner's journey to get pregnant again / surveilling that process) and nature, but many of the nature imagery poems don't really reach beyond that: imagery. There is a sense, often, of merely skimming the surface of emotion. Chin-Tanner plays with structure a bit as well, but it's much more effective in some poems than others. There's also the reappearance in a few poems of her black hair, pale face, etc., which I wished she engaged with in some deeper or more meaningful way. (I'll concede that this is perhaps unfair of me; I never want to insinuate that poems by people of color must engage with race, but as a Chinese-American woman writer, I am always interested in seeing the conversations others choose to hold with identity, race, gender, etc.)
  
  I'll add the caveat that I'm not a mother and don't plan on becoming one anytime soon; maybe I'm just not the target audience here. I'm willing to consider the possibility that I missed some nuance or sentiments vis-à-vis those particular poems.
• 
  Virginia

  Anyone Will Tell You is simply a must-read. She had me at her formal innovations and dexterity alone, but the depth and humanity of her poetic and anthropological/sociological vision, make this collection one of the few in the last decade that never sacrifices form to content or vice versa, instead capturing all the threads in her warm and capacious, yet laconic and space, decidedly-maternal and philosophical voice and vision. The result is astounding -- what Plath might have written, given the kind of care, nurturance, and ethical/aesthetic sensibility Chin-Tanner has cultivated, and gives to her lucky readers, amid the aporias of a conflicted time, page after heart-stopping page.
• 
  Anatoly Molotkov

  "you are dust// the dust you/ tell yourself/ of some dead// star staring/ back to see/ how far you// have fallen" This magnificent collection cracks the language open and ponders essential questions about identity, nature, truth, morality in a tender way that acknowledges the limits of our ability to answer them and fascinates with its open-ended possibilities.
• 
  Stephen Page

  Here Wendy Chin-Tanner bombards the reader with poetry that implodes the universe and rebangs to form your cortex.
• 
  Veronica Davidov

  This poetry collection is by turns lovely and delicate, meditative and grounded, and unsettling and haunting. It is always powerful. It rewards the cerebral reader without being esoteric. It weds precision of visceral experience where a line or two can cut deep with a quiet existential gravitas. The trisyllabic tercets (3x3s) format that the poems follow is both fresh and surprising and at the same has a rhythm that feels deeply familiar, like a comfortable pathway for thoughts and evocations. An amazing book.