[07/30/24] Chan, Marianne: Leaving Biddle City

Sarabande Books, paperback

Publication Date: July 30, 2024

Publisher Marketing: A brand new collection from award-winning poet Marianne Chan. A coming-of-age narrative, Leaving Biddle City details one Filipina American speaker's experience of growing up amid a white, Midwestern suburbia mythologized as "Biddle City." Through prose poems, pantoums, ballads, flattened haikus, and thematic autobiographies, Chan maps a territory of intergenerational conflict, racial alienation, and memory and forgetfulness. What's achieved is a work of play and meticulous beauty, a collection that reframes how we may understand ourselves, our histories, and the places where we are from.