The poetry of Mary Jean Chan is her most complete act of self-expression. At once ultimately personal and awfully relatable, she writes as an act of self-love. Her identity is her most sacred and hard-won achievement, which she expresses through her poems as part of the completion of a journey to self-acceptance. One may imagine that with such a pronounced emphasis on the self, Chan's poetry remains largely inaccessible or even solipsistic, but in fact, it is the opposite. While her experience is entirely personal, Chan writes only ever about the human experience, the struggle between desire and shame.
Part of what makes Chan's poetry so vulnerable is her confession of internal conflict. She loves her mother, but her mom has never been able to accept her daughter's queer identity. Poems like "The Window" and "Names" relate to an adolescence rife with conflict between mother and daughter, exclusively directed at Chan's preference for female lovers. In a sense, their drama is the same as ever teen daughter and her mom -- reckless love, -- but they navigate a somewhat unique aspect of this drama through a conflict of culture, identity, and age.
Chan's immense heart shines through her texts. Much of her own internal struggle relates to the balance she continually attempts to strike between honoring herself, honoring her mother, and honoring her lovers. "Names" imparts a brief glance at the shame and disappointment which Chan places on herself from all fronts when she maintains a secret relationship. Above all, she longs for acceptance. Chan does, however, accept herself. At least she manages a certain degree of defiant self-acceptance in response to what she identifies in her mom's reservation in poems like "what my mother (a poet) might say."
