The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty
Poetry

The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty

By
Marilyn Chin
“Reading [Chin], our sense of the possibilities of poetry is opened further.” —ADRIENNE RICH
Select Format

Since Milkweed Editions’ original publication of The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty, Marilyn Chin has been widely celebrated as a consummate poet of the hybrid experience. At once ancient and contemporary, personal and political, grounded and yet uniquely dazzling, this extraordinary collection blends Asian and Western sensibilities in a pioneering way.

Here, with wit and energy, Chin defines her existence as a first-generation Asian American woman, effectively straddling two cultures. And she spins virtuoso jazz in her juxtaposition of the contemporary with images and metaphors from Chinese tales and classic poems, creating an expansive poetry of self.

Featuring an afterword by the author addressing the collection’s effect and the developments in her work since, this edition reintroduces a modern classic to a new generation of readers.

ISBN
9781571314390
Publish Date
Pages
112
Dimensions
6 × 9 × 0.31 in
Weight
6.3 oz
Cover Art

Praise and Prizes

  • “Marilyn Chin’s poems excite and incite the imagination through their brilliant cultural interfacings, their theatre of anger, ‘fierce and tender,’ their compassion, and their high mockery of wit. Reading her, our sense of the possibilities of poetry is opened further, and we feel again what an active, powerful art it can be.”

    Adrienne Rich

  • “Marilyn Chin’s dazzling longing creates a past that becomes essential to our understanding of her elliptical and passionately insistent poetic statement.”

    Los Angeles Times

  • “Full of mysterious images, gifts from another culture, details that enlarge our world.”

    Library Journal

  • “These poems combine sumptuous imagery and startling, articulate intelligence to explore and record the horrifying as well as the satisfying, the seductive components of hyphenated (American) identity. Marilyn Chin wrestles and she flies with both sides of her continuing history… . I cannot imagine a more compelling manuscript of poems centered on the difficult gift of racial and cultural ‘double consciousness.’”

    June Jordan

  • “This is poetry wrought from expansive intelligence in which the ironic or elegiac tone is not derived from mere cleverness or wit, but from the precise and genuine wisdom of the heart.”

    Sam Hamill

  • “Marilyn Chin has a voice all her own—witty, epigraphic, idiomatic, elegiac, earthly.”

    The Progressive

    You Might Enjoy

    Based on this book, we recommend you try…
    Poetry

    You Are Here

    Ada Limón

    A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
    A 2024 NPR “Books We Love” Selection

    Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty…

    [...] book cover
    Poetry

    [...]

    Fady Joudah
    From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.
    Poetry

    Startlement

    Ada Limón

    Drawing from six previously published books—including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things—as well as vibrant new work, Startlement exalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Ada Limón wades into…