CHINATOWN SONNETS

My chapbook, Chinatown Sonnets is now available! Check out other gorgeous titles by New Delta Review here!

​

Many thanks to the staff at New Delta Review! Thank you Phillip Spotswood, Meghan Saas for your beautiful cover and book design, and Raquel Thorne for the interview!

​

Many thanks to Douglas Kearney, this year's New Delta Review chapbook contest judge. Read Doug's foreword of my collection here!

​

​

Praise for Chinatown Sonnets:

This is a very smart pilgrim’s passage through an illusory pageant of abundance that sets up with the finest Medieval values and intelligence a dilemma where the jewel and its matrix are one and the same! Here, Chinatown is the last precious plastic ornament from childhood and at once an amazing celebration of the pleasures we take from simply being alive in the astonishing here and now. This is a wonderful collection. 

—Norman Dubie

In Chinatown Sonnets, Dorothy Chan gives you the scoop on her world in 14-line installments, machine-gun sonnets that move in lightning strikes from Hollywood to Philly, from Hong Kong to Vegas. You will hear about dogs, club girls, grandmas, the King of Dead Fish, and so much more. How does she get so much into so few lines? This is like a dim sum feast, each poetic dumpling tastier than the last. A scrumptious collection.

—Barbara Hamby  

In Chinatown Sonnets, Dorothy Chan describes the “bizarrchitecture” of our particular globalized time in a tone so disarmingly frank, it’s impossible not to salivate at the glut of lotus buns, puppies, JELL-O molds, and knock off Louis Vuitton. The poet deftly splices countries and generations together with neon-vivid images in the same way Hollywood splices fiction and reality. The result: a pirated DVD dream the world has collectively bought. With an astonishing nimbleness equal to poetry’s best sonnet purveyors, Chan captures our doomed relationship with global capitalism in 2017. Describing a dead fish at the market, she writes “We go to buy him. I won’t touch his head.”  

—Monica McClure

​

​