Return of the Chinese Femme

by Dorothy Chan

The speaker in Dorothy Chan’s fifth collection, Return of the Chinese Femme, walks through life fearlessly, “forehead forever exposed,” the East Asian symbol of female aggression. She’s the troublemaker protagonist—the “So Chinese Girl”—the queer in a family of straights— the rambunctious ringleader of the girl band, always ready with the perfect comeback, wearing a blue fur coat, drinking a whiskey neat. They indulge on the themes of food, sex, fantasy, fetish, popular culture, and intimacy.

Chan organizes the collection in the form of a tasting menu, offering the reader a taste of each running theme. Triple sonnets, recipe poems, and other inventive plays on diction and form pepper the collection. Amidst the bravado, Return of the Chinese Femme represents all aspects of her identity—Asian heritage, queerness, kid of immigrants’ story—in the most real ways possible, conquering the world through joy and resilience.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer, Asian Literature

88 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 30, 2024

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

[Maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The lesbian Filipina in me is absolutely in love with every single word in this collection 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈💗

[X]

DNF. I appreciate a poet who really goes for it, structurally, and this book had that. And I enjoyed all the references/imagery. But I found this to be very literal, and in that sense it didn’t really work for me as poetry.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Playful and decadent!

[Iris · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was so fucking good oh my god, and also goddamn listening to these poems out loud in class was awkward as hell, but like listening to Dorothy Chan read some of her poetry definitely enriched the experience because she has a really intense way of reading them that doesn't fully come through just seeing the words on a page

[Hallie Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

so fun and sexy and horny and great. loved all the food and pop culture references. loved it!!

[Sam Albala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zodiac / Snake / 我愛你 / Food / Sexy / constructs / discovery / patterns / teen dramas / nostalgia / recipes Dragon / luxury / longing / superstitions / surprising / courtside at a Lakers game / Vegas / Philadelphia / Batman Villains / standards /

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this collection and several of the poems were very well observed but there was just a lack of self-awareness that made these poems somewhat painful to read -- maybe because in some ways it felt like a much younger version of myself that I feel embarrassed by? Hard to say.

[Connie]

I’ll be reading “Comet and Cupid” repeatedly for the foreseeable future.

[Kristi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal

[Rowen H.]

Bounced hard off most of these

[Valentina · Rating 4 out of 5]

not usually into poetry so thank you to the New York Public Library for packaging sets of poetry books by color with little ribbons around them and enticing me into reading this. Loved it

[Mya Matteo]

Triple Sonnet for Silver Foxes is incredible.