“Sometimes, what I hear, I believe.” Sylvia Chan’s We Remain Traditional is a score of sound upon breakwater. Commanding and sifting through language the way a musician harnesses emotion and craft into playing an instrument and bellowing, Chan produces documentation of music in the travels and revels of everyday life: “my history gets lost in a war” turntables with “I wonder which pop icon will outspeak the other.” Music as the migration of sound is multiplied present tense: “what’s cleft is an introspective singer knowing how feet feel,” and “my mother’s Singer, a final sales item from Sears.” Chan chooses, names—in lyrics broken and pieced by time, practice, Adam, and Chinese/American histories—how music is a patterned force of many moments stacked, moving forward, and pulling back.
—JANICE LOBO SAPIGAO
An intimate monologue-song, Sylvia Chan’s We Remain Traditional manages to bring together the desiring/devastated body and colonialism, a country’s war and a household violence, Canton and Berlin and Oakland, as it explores how the broken self is knit, how it is made and re-made, how “breaking a counter- / point can only be understood / by those who have known ruin.” In this place of history and poetry, “where we observe / each other,” everyday textures like meat sinews stuck in teeth are measured alongside gender and racial politics, intertextual encounters, and a musician’s improvisations, until we the listeners find ourselves vibrating underneath a powerful and unsettling journey of voice, where, indeed, “each musical articulation / remains a call and response.”
—JENNIFER S. CHENG
“Sylvia Chan’s We Remain Traditional is anything but that. It is a nervy, saturated tale told with improvisational fervor—richly personal but crosscut by history and culture: “part waltz, part bitter / lawless beauty.” There are inter-leavings of politics, race, music, amor, all in the service of a young woman’s traversal of memory and wakefulness. The verse is as bravely set as the “story” is, with a freedom that feels inevitable: fragmented, dispersed, yet held together by a sinewy poetic logic. The body of this text is a lived one; so, too, it opens into life.”
—AARON SHURIN
"At times, I was reminded of Dawn Lundy Martin's Discipline, for its awareness of the body as a site of colonization and control, and the way trauma is absorbed, re-lived, and re-enacted. . . .The poem becomes a social site where a range of voices, classical and contemporary, are set in dialogue with one another. Call it a community."
—Green Linden Press