My latest collection, Return of the Chinese Femme (Deep Vellum, 2024) is now available!! 

 

 

Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry

 

 
 

About the Collection
 

Description: An unabashed exploration of queerness, excess, identity, and tenderness from award-winning poet Dorothy Chan.

 

The speaker in Dorothy Chan’s fifth collection, Return of the Chinese Femme, walks through life fearlessly, “forehead forever exposed,” the East Asian symbol of female aggression. She’s the troublemaker protagonist—the “So Chinese Girl”—the queer in a family of straights— the rambunctious ringleader of the girl band, always ready with the perfect comeback, wearing a blue fur coat, drinking a whiskey neat. They indulge on the themes of food, sex, fantasy, fetish, popular culture, and intimacy.

 

Chan organizes the collection in the form of a tasting menu, offering the reader a taste of each running theme. Triple sonnets, recipe poems, and other inventive plays on diction and form pepper the collection. Amidst the bravado, Return of the Chinese Femme represents all aspects of her identity—Asian heritage, queerness, kid of immigrants’ story—in the most real ways possible, conquering the world through joy and resilience.

 

Praise
 

Norman Dubie:

 

 “There is a sometimes rowdy elegance in these poems that is like a brilliant mind whispering again to itself. The voice instructs us to love life even when it has most betrayed us. The reader is consoled in all of it. What a great book.” 

 

 

Rosebud Ben-Oni:

 

“Our favorite Triple Sonnet Heroine does indeed reawaken our desires for ‘dishing’ and ‘decadence’ in Return of the Chinese Femme. In their latest dazzling collection, Dorothy K. Chan guides us through sumptuous frolic and feasting . . . Never without humor, Chan takes on political and social inhibitions, turns them inside out and upside down, with a playfulness unique to the very mantra: ‘and oh, I crave and I crave and crave and crave.’ Return of the Chinese Femme won’t leave you wanting, and yet wanting more from Chan, the next poem, the new collection which continues ‘K is for kink. K is for knot. K is for kissing, / K is for king. Crown me.’ 

 

 

Christina Pugh:

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“Chan’s elegantly gargantuan appetite relishes everything from coconut and sago soup to Cantonese chicken wings; everything from ‘deviled eggs to mac and cheese, and Heart Attack Burgers on secret menus.’ Chan craves not only these litanies of dishes, but also sexual encounters with women and men, including those that ‘defy gender’—and always saves room to savor pop culture icons like Dennis Rodman and Rob Lowe (as Hello Kitty). From her ‘amuse-bouche’ triple sonnets to her embedded recipes, Chan’s work is delectably fiery. She moves between Asian and American cultures, as well as varied poetic forms, with finesse—and what (almost) rhymes with finesse? Fearless. That, for me, is the word to describe this book.” 

 

 

Divya Victor:

 

“A juicy, fluffy, bouncy, and loud refusal of the mandate to enshrine the stereotype of the melancholic Asian prostate in the service of dominant understandings of our traumas. These poems are defiant in their exploration of the other side of hunger: the voracity and veracity of a femme’s many appetites. Chan’s verse is insatiably kinesthetic, persuasive in its strut, equally capable of evoking the exuberance of kinship and the scintillation of erotic connection. Because is it even a revolution if it does not romp? Please. Baby.”