SOURCE: Gery, John. “Mocking My Own Ripeness: Authenticity, Heritage, and Self-Erasure in the Poetry of Marilyn Chin.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 12, no. 1 (April 2001): 25-45.

In the following essay, Gery maintains that Chin finds her own voice, and transcends the constraints confronted by women writers of color, through “articulate emptinesses” and “imaginative reconstruction of the diverse resources she inherits.”

Although ensnared in a complex nexus of gender, race, ancient traditions, and literary conventions, Marilyn Chin's poetry at its most resilient invites all these cultural and literary forces into it, whether explicitly as subject matter or obliquely in form and language. As Sau-ling Cynthia Wong notes about Chin's first collection, Dwarf Bamboo (1987), Chin is “Chinese-literate but open to a host of poetic influences,” and because of her “passionate sense of craft” (“Chinese American” 53), what has emerged, even in her poems of cynicism or despair, is a finely honed voice struggling...