Brown Jericho - When I grow up I want to be a list of further possibilities. 39

Table of Contents A CKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to the editors of the following publications, where poems in this book (often as earlier versions) first appeared: The Adroit Journal: Nature Poem, Song of the Nights Gift; Bat City Review: Frog-Hopping Gravestones; Bear Review: In the Hospital; The Best American Poetry 2015: for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me (first published in PANK); Breakwater Review: Elegy for My Sadness, Song of the Anti-Sisyphus; Codex Journal: Irreducible Sociality; Construction Magazine: Sorrow Song with Optimus Prime; Crab Orchard Review: In Search of the Least Abandoned Constellation; Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts: First Light; DIAGRAM: Please take off your shoes before entering do not disturb; Drunken Boat: How I Became Sagacious, In This Economy; Dusie: Little Song; Fjords Review: When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities; Fogged Clarity: Elegy, West of Schenectady; Gulf Coast: Self-Portrait as So Much Potential; Indiana Review: In the City, Poem; jmww: Didier et Zizou, Talking to God About Heaven from the Bed of a Heathen; The Margins: Chapter VIII; The Massachusetts Review: Second Thoughts on a Winter Afternoon; Narrative: Self-Portrait With & Without; Narrative Northeast: Kafkas Axe & Michaels Vest, Things Stuck in Other Things Where They Dont Belong; Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color: Spell to Find Family; New Delta Review: Antarctica; Ostrich Review: Night falls like a button (as Sleeping in the Last of Summer), Race to the Tree; PANK: babel & juice (as poem,/love,), Summer Was Forever, Talented Human Beings (as Jerking Off to Koh Masaki); The Pinch: Elegy to Be Exhaled at Dusk; Poetry: Im not a religious person but, Poplar Street; Print-Oriented Bastards: Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls; The Screaming Sheep: Ode to My Envy; Southern Indiana Review: The Cuckoo Cry; Tupelo Quarterly: Song with a Lyric from Allen Ginsberg; Twelfth House: If I should die tomorrow, please note that I will miss the particular (as If I Should Die Tomorrow, Please Know That These Are the Sounds I Will Miss Most From This Good & Outrageous Earth), To the Guanacos at the Syracuse Zoo. Im not a religious person but also appears in The Poetry Review (UK), a special issue featuring work first published in Poetry. First Light, Kafkas Axe & Michaels Vest, Poplar Street also appear in Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, an anthology published by Sundress Publications in 2016. Antarctica, babel & juice, for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me, Little Song, Please take off your shoes before entering do not disturb, Sorrow Song with Optimus Prime also appear in Kissing the Sphinx, a chapbook published by Two of Cups Press in 2016. Race to the Tree, Spell to Find Family, Summer Was Forever also appear in Set the Garden on Fire, a chapbook published by Porkbelly Press in 2015. I am grateful to Nicci Mechler and Leigh Anne Hornfeldt, my incredibly hardworking chapbook editors and publishers, for first believing that my poems have something to say, as bodies of work.

I am grateful to Kundiman, Lambda Literary, Tent: Creative Writing, and the Saltonstall Arts Colony for gifts of time and community. I am immensely lucky to have worked with these brilliant teachers: Polina Barskova, Curtis Bauer, Michael Burkard, Kimberly Chang, Floyd Cheung, Katie Cortese, Martn Espada, Aracelis Girmay, Deborah Gorlin, Sarah C. Harwell, Brooks Haxton, Christopher Kennedy, Jacqueline Kolosov, Heather Madden, David Tomas Martinez, Leslie Jill Patterson, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rachel Rubinstein, George Saunders, Yuan Shu, William Wenthe. Special thanks to Bruce Smith for reading these poems again and again, in the smartest ways. Thanks to class- and workshopmates: Tessa Brown, Grady Chambers, Cassandra de Alba, Nancy Dinan, Patrick Dundon, David Gustavsen, Sophia Holtz, Mark Keats, Carolyn Li-Madeo, Jessica Poli, Yanira Rodriguez, Kate Simonian, Sarah Viren. To all my teachers and fellow writers at Hampshire, Syracuse, and Texas Tech: thank you.

To my amazing students: thank you. I would also like to express gratitude to Sherman Alexie for selecting a poem of mine for The Best American Poetry 2015; I am also deeply, fiercely grateful for the work by fellow Asian American poets in this anthologyRajiv Mohabir, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Monica Youn, Jane Wong. And Id like to take the time to acknowledge here the real and brilliant Asian American poet who could have appeared in the anthology instead of the appropriating and exoticizing white American poet who did appear. Crucial, for literature and for living: to think historically, to dream critically, to build more spaces in which more voices are present, more presences dreaming and disturbing what is known. Many thanks to the people who have asked me to come read, talk, participate, build: Kaveh Akbar, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Cam Awkward-Rich, Erika Jo Brown, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Doug Paul Case, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Danielle DeTiberus, Duy Doan, David Eye, Mckendy Fils-Aim, Danielle Legros Georges, Roy Guzmn, Luther Hughes, Peter LaBerge, Iris A. Law, Laurin Macios and others at Mass Poetry, Rachel McKibbens, Erin J.

Mullikin, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Sam Sax, Kate Schapira, Danez Smith, Erin Elizabeth Smith and Fox Frazier-Foley, Christopher Soto, Jeremy Tow. My thanks and my love: Eric Berlin, Gabrielle Friedman, Mag Gabbert, Rupert Giles, Becca Glaser, Zach Horvitz, Anna Jekel, Swati Khurana, Muriel Leung, Trevor Pace, Monica Sok, Caitlin Vance. For entertaining all my wackiness and coming over for brunch and listening to me ramble on about this manuscript, my thanks and my love to Jessica Smith and Sam Herschel Wein. My love and my thanks and my love to Jeff Gilbert. Love, in all the true difficult lucky ways, to my parents and my brothers; to my family, chosen and across oceans. To Peter Conners, Jenna Fisher, Richard Foerster, Sandy Knight, and everyone at BOA: youve made the dream I had since I was in second grade come true.

Endless thanks to Jericho Brown for saying this book should exist and for encouraging me to make the book I want to read. A BOUT THE A UTHOR Chen Chen was born in Xiamen, China, and grew up in Massachusetts. He earned his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University, where he was a University Fellow. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. His work has appeared in two chapbooks and in publications such as Poetry, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation, Lambda Literary, and in 2015 he was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships.

Chen lives in Lubbock, Texas, with his partner, Jeff Gilbert. BOA E DITIONS , L TD . T HE A. P OULIN , J R . N EW P OETS OF A MERICA S ERIES

No. D. D. Snodgrass
No. 2	Beast Is a Wolf with Brown Fire Poems by Barry Wallenstein Foreword by M. L. Rosenthal
No. 3	Along the Dark Shore Poems by Edward Byrne