SOURCE: Lynch, Doris. Review of The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, by Marilyn Chin. Library Journal 119, no. 3 (15 February 1994): 164.

In the following review, Lynch offers high praise for most of the poems in The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty.

The strongest poems in Chin's second collection [The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty.] (after Dwarf Bamboo, Greenfield, 1987) present an immigrant's view, combining old stories and sensibilities with an American idiom. In “How I Got That Name,” the author reveals how she received her name from two cultures. In adopting a new land and renouncing the old, she writes, “My loss is your loss, a dialect here, a memory there.” Her verse is full of mysterious images, gifts from another culture, details that enlarge our world: “her lotus feet,” “almond grass-jelly and guava,” “my umbilical cord wrapped in rice-paper.” As in every collection, there are weaker entries, especially those set at...