Carlina Duan

Celebrating Chinese American girlhood in all its confusion, love, and loss. In I Wore My Blackest Hair, Fulbright grant and Edna Meudt Memorial Award recipient Carlina Duan delivers an electric debut collection of poetry. With defiance and wild joy, Duan's poems wrestle with and celebrate ancestry and history, racial consciousness, and the growing pains of girlhood. They explore difficult truths with grace and power. I Wore My Blackest Hair is an honest portrait of a woman in-between--identities, places, languages, and desires--and her quest to belong. The speaker is specific in her self-definition, discovering and reinventing what it means to be a bold woman, what it means to be Chinese American, and what it means to grow into adulthood. Duan moves seamlessly from the personal to the imaginative to the universal, heralding a brilliant new voice in contemporary poetry.

I Wore My Blackest Hair

Deepika Ramesh

I loved Duan's voice more in her pieces about her mother and her sister. There was a force, which was more than anger, and it didn't demand sympathy nor did it wallow in self-pity. I enjoyed those parts in this spoken-word poetry collection. The other pieces were lukewarm.

Moray Lyle McIntosh

An interesting collection of poetry focusing on the second-generation immigrant experience and reconciling American and Chinese culture. Duan rakes up powerful emotions of isolation and belonging, both with regards to her race and her sex and brings to light the prejudice caused by both. There are some sucker-punch verses that leap right off the page: 

My mother 
Does not own a
Laundromat or
A take-out restaurant;
She waters orchids
And doesn’t look
Your president
In the eye

Your white classmate sees you. Does not.
White men claim you. Do not.
You are small, fierce and evil: with
Two palms and a chest. There are 
boxes made for you to check.
Chinese /
American. Chinese / American.
Your mom calls. She tells you to
Stop
Writing about race. You could get 
shot, she says

Many were too dilatory for me. While I could feel the emotion I couldn’t really connect to the words. For me, this style of poetry is too loose and unformed, the structure appearing random rather than considered and the metaphors, while striking, are too often over-wrought and hollow at the centre.

I Wore My Blackest Hair

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