SOURCE: Review of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, by Marilyn Chin. Publishers Weekly 248, no. 43 (22 October 2001): 71.

In the following review, the critic offers overall praise for Rhapsody in Plain Yellow.

Chin's concerns for heritage and descent, matched with confrontational rhetoric, seem to make her an old-school poet of Asian-American identity, while a liberal use of autobiographical material (her grandmother, her parents, her neighborhood, her lovers, her English department) positions her speaker as a representative witness to modern, multicultural, middle-class California. This third collection's [Rhapsody in Plain Yellow] jagged rhythms and fragmented forms, some based on Chinese poetry and music, others derived from blues and Persian ghazals, thus seem a small-scale syncretism of the personal and political. Chin can tear at familial wounds even while expressing dismay at the limits of tradition: “I, my mother's aging girl / Myopic, goat-footed // Got snagged on an unmarked trail / The road diverged; I took / The...