Andy Chen, a native of New Jersey, holds an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is the recipient of a Kundiman fellowship. His poems are forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly and his reviews have appeared in the Colorado Review and Euphony.
“Chinaman”!
“Laundryman”!
Don’t call me “Chinaman”!
Yes, I am a “Laundryman”!
The workingman!
Don’t call me “Chinaman”,
I am the Worldman
In Chord, his third collection of poems, Rick Barot leads us through far-flung concerns, continually hovering in a space between real and imagined. The days are gods. The manzanita trees are gods. Gardens bloom all white or all black or not at all. Typhoon Nina shakes Barot’s childhood home in the Philippines all over again, and the sugarcane fields burn and burn. The Annunciation is rewritten.