Leaving Biddle City - by Marianne Chan (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Electric Literature, "8 Poetry Collections with a Compelling Sense of Place"

"Biddle City holds the speaker. In a book as immersive as this one, it holds us too."

--Abbie Kiefer, Electric Literature

"Inspired by her life, Marianne Chan's Leaving Biddle City follows a Filapina American speaker growing up in the Midwest. There's themes around coming-of-age, racial identity, and isolation. As it explores these ideas, it asks readers to rethink how they view themselves and the places they come from."

--Kendra Winchester, Book Riot's "New Releases"

"Chan's unique sense of humor and lyricism beautifully captures the experiences of an immigrant family in a Midwestern town."

--Leonora Simonovis, Poetry Foundation

"The collection pulses with and against memory--'the difference between memory and imagination is simply the clay you use'--and leans heavily on the rhythms of the sentence, from prose poems to lists. Leaving, in these poems, echoes how place follows us, even in negation: 'Sometime I am lonely for my idea of Lake Michigan, a place to bathe and come out cleaner than I was.'"
--Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub's "Six Poetry Collections to Read in July"

"Marianne Chan's poems in Leaving Biddle Cityare ghostly, ghosts, and ghost-like. Even the language repeats and circulates within their forms, but without the frames of their forms. 'What is place without place? What is memory without memory?, ' these skilled and beautiful poems seem to ask."
--Victoria Chang, author of The Trees Witness Everything

"Marianne Chan's writing is all so tender and rich, deeply imbued with a generosity of wanting to share a place that feels like it could be your place, made for you to fit into as well. Leaving Biddle City is a wonderful expansion on the touchable, beautiful universe of Marianne Chan, and I am so glad to have been immersed in it for a wonderful time."
--Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America

"In playful and lyrical leaps, the poems turn like pages in a photo album. Marianne Chan's speaker meditates on the meaning of what it means to be 'Mid-Western' in conjunction with what it means to be 'Filipina, ' and through examinations within the prose poem's metaphorical boxiness and in dialogue with the speaker's community, the poems soar into ecstatic remembrances. What persists in this remarkable collection are important questions about the choices we make for love, and Chan's beautiful writing will persist as thoroughly as the poured concrete of foundations inscribed with names of family."
--Oliver de la Paz, author of The Diaspora Sonnets

"Marianne Chan's Leaving Biddle City proposes a rare and unflinching poetics of immigrant suburban life, inventively evocative of both the monotony and wild audacity of a demographic of experience that is at once mundane and vital, hidden and clambering for utterance. Chan offers a surprising and brilliant kind of anti-poetry, observing how 'All things beautiful. Become insufferable, ' yet herein lies its power as an ode to the unglamorous inhabitants of an unglamorous city, that is, as an act of disruption to the mythical origin story, one full of failures--and also love. With pointed honesty and refreshing humor, these poems are for the ones who came here, 'found they'd been scammed, ' and 'decided to build their houses anyway.'"
--Jennifer S. Cheng, author of House A

About the Author

Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award in Poetry, the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, and the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. A Kundiman Fellow, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Cincinnati.