SOURCE: Review of The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, by Marilyn Chin.Publishers Weekly 241, no. 9 (28 February 1994): 79.

In the following review, the critic praises Chin's simplicity of imagery and language in The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty.

[In The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty] Chin (Dwarf Bamboo) writes with a toughened lyricism that persuades us of the poet's firm life knowledge: she never imputes to experience (or poetry) a false or wishful glamour. Yet Chin refuses to sacrifice her sensibility to cynicism, either, though at times she is willing to acknowledge bitterness, contempt or disappointment as her lot. Instead, she seems to strike a balance between ideal and tatty, pure and spoiled, a balance that is literary and also cultural, considering her own position as one whose father, “a petty thug, / who bought a chain of chopsuey joints / in Piss River, Oregon,” named his Asian American daughter after Marilyn...