[11/01/25] Chen, Ching-In: Shiny City

Airlie Press, paperback

Publication Date: November 1, 2025

Publisher Marketing: Ching-In Chen's Shiny City examines the "real" and imagined history of Riverside, California's Chinatown, juxtaposed with a speculative shiny city of the global future. Word by word, syntax by syntax, Chen projects the essential and unrecorded voices of the Chinese immigrants who picked and packed fruit in Riverside's citrus groves and worked as house servants in the late 1800's through the 1930's, as well as the travelers and inhabitants of "shiny city" as they navigate its accelerated process of growth and decay. Both experimental and narrative, these poems juxtapose found texts with a singular kind of imagining: through a wild love, and despite an incomplete and fragmented archive, Shiny City reconstructs its own kind of history with beauty that emerges from between the cracks.