Marilyn Chin – Michigan Quarterly Review

Marilyn Chin

Poet Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong but grew up in Portland, Oregon. She earned a BA in Chinese literature from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A noted anthologist, translator and educator as well as a poet and novelist, Chin’s work distills her experiences as an Asian American and feminist. Her poetry is noted for its direct and often confrontational attitude. “The pains of cultural assimilation infuse her … poems,” wrote Contemporary Women Poets essayist Anne-Elizabeth Green, noting that in the collections Dwarf Bamboo (1987) and The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (1994) “Chin struggles passionately and eloquently in the pull between the country left behind and America—the troubled landscape that is now home.” Chin is also the author of the poetry collections Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2002), Hard Love Province (2014), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems (2018).

Singing Worm

Carlos is not just any worm. Carlos’s immune system is so strong that Moonie can bombard it with legions of aggressive invader organisms, and Carlos fends them off. But what’s truly remarkable about this worm is that while gobbling up intruders like a worthy ninja, it screeches out the famous first bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

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