Juvenilia won the 2009 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. The book contains a wide assortment of poetic genres. Some pieces resemble aphorism, others confessional narrative, and still others stream-of-consciousness in which (as Louise Gluck says in praise of Chen) “cryptic non-sequitur and silence often substitute for disclosure.”

At the close of the volume’s final poem, the pseudo-epic “Invisible Memoir,” the poet confesses what may be seen as the constant thread uniting so many disparate poems—“All I want is to tell you stories about my life” (77). By the conclusion of Juvenilia, the reader has gazed deeply into the poet’s past. We have witnessed the toil of his family history and have studied the separation of his parents “who are as talkative as trees” (14). We learn of the poet’s brother, who seeks his past but sits in silence, as “silence is the mystery he tracked through pale family mist of Taiwan,” and we listen to the story of the grandmother who “didn’t call when her stomach bled” (13-15). We behold an intense intimacy between the poet and his mother, and glimpse subtle manifestations of a lingering (if perhaps ironic) connection between his separated parents.

We also watch as the poet embraces his past as a determinant of his future. The poem “Echo,” for example, closes with a vision of the speaker’s future self in which he is enraptured with love for someone he has yet to meet. This speaker, however, is haunted by the ghosts of his past—ghosts that “roam through our dinner table” alongside echoes of his grandfather’s cough and memories of his parents’ broken marriage, preserved in an album where “faces that would not kiss in life press together as the pages close” (10). Childhood recollections and familial trauma become potent metaphors for adult displacement, and yet, they function as the “ghosts” by which the speaker may “die into a man,” becoming “real” with self-conscious introspection (5).

Juvenilia may revel in the poet’s individuality, but it pairs its poems of personal memory with aphoristic musings, love songs (which the author satirically derides as “banal”) and the occasional piece from a perspective other than that of the dominant poetic “voice.”

The more aphoristic poems, such as “Dramatic Monologue Against the Self” and “Bon Voyage, Our Sweltering Us” are both witty and severely intelligent. In “Bon Voyage,” for example, the poet writes two sentences about two characters, only to then conclude: “these things have nothing in common with each other except that they have nothing in common with each other” (38). Much of contemporary poetry endeavors to speak in silence, demanding that the reader piece together non-sequiturs that are indeed “cryptic.” In “Bon Voyage,” Chen mocks such an aesthetic. His work is littered with moments of the non-sequitur, but however “cryptic” such moments may appear, Chen reminds us that they are not impenetrable. These moments serve to share emotion, awareness, and narrative; they do not merely aspire to baffle.

Chen’s poems bear the complexity, irony, sincerity, and wit of tragic-comedy. The pseudo-autobiography that pervades Juvenilia at times suffers from redundancy. Some poems, such as “In the City I Drowned All Night In the Nothing Search For You,” appear to succumb to triteness and cliché (though we must concede that Chen does categorize this poem among his “banal” songs). The stylistic execution of Juvenilia oscillates between prose-poem, free-verse, and aphoristic prose (which one might regard as something more analytic, and perhaps satirical, than the conventional work of prose poetry). Some poems employ only one style, while others mesh them. The form, like the voice it contains, appears distinctly that of the poet; expressive and melodic, but neither innovative nor heroically ambitious.

One piece, “It is a City You See Through Water,” defies such categorization. Its execution is indeed innovative, as it assembles a poem about a visit to Seattle from a collage of disparate memories (or more probably diary entries) each dated and time-stamped. The poem proceeds without chronological predictability, which forces its reader to juxtapose the poem, as text presented, with the narrative provided by its component parts (once reassembled into a chronologically sensible story-line). The concept behind the poem is interesting, though the piece itself lacks the emotional, imagistic, or narrative power (perhaps because of its temporal fragmentation) to profoundly impact the reader.

In the words of Ken Chen, “You should buy [Juvenilia] if your parents are immigrants. Or if you have broken up recently. Or if your parents have broken up lately.” Though the book may well appeal to such a demographic, Juvenilia also promises a worthwhile read for those interested in the intersection between various poetic dichotomies: lyric and narrative, poetic voice and poet’s experience, prose-poetry and free verse, etc. The book exhibits both strengths and shortcomings, but it possesses sufficient depth that it will offer different pleasures and different insights to different readers. It bears true witness to Chen’s assertion that “context is dynamic” (68).