Southern Illinois University Press, 2005 eISBN: 978-0-8093-8833-2 | Paper: 978-0-8093-2618-1 Library of Congress Classification PS3603.H3575C57 2005 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Taking its concept of concentricity from the eponymous Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, Circle, the first collection from Victoria Chang, adopts the shape as a trope for gender, family, and history. These lyrical, narrative, and hybrid poems trace the spiral trajectory of womanhood and growth and plot the progression of self as it ebbs away from and returns to its roots in an Asian American family and context. Locating human desire within the helixes of politics, society, and war, Chang skillfully draws arcs between T’ang Dynasty suicides and Alfred Hitchcock leading ladies, between the Hong Kong Flower Lounge and an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch, the Rape of Nanking and civilian casualties in Iraq.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Victoria Chang’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Threepenny Review, Best American Poetry 2005, and other publications, and she is the editor of the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. She has earned degrees from the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford University, and is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Scholarship, a Kenyon Writer’s Workshop Taylor Fellowship, the Hopwood Award, and the Holden Minority Fellowship from the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. She resides in Los Angeles.
REVIEWS
Chang's poems concern themselves with, among numerous topics, the lives of women. Not just the Chinese American woman - daughter, mother, grandmother - but also women in general: athelte, "bombshell", business-woman, gardener, lover. As well as women in history and art: Sarah Emmon Edwards, who joined the Union Army as a man; Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress; Yang Gui Fei, "favored concubine" of a Chinese emperor; and women in Edward Hopper's paintings. Chang's techniques are confident and varied: the unbalanced couplet, with the first line always longer than the second to keep readers off balance; synesthesia for tension and lyricism; wry and muscular diction. The book's ending phrase is an homage to Chang's foremother in Asian American poetry circles, Cathy Song: "a thousand young larks mount the sudden breeze." A paean to healing.
— Vince Gotera, North American Review May-August 2006
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments 00
1. On Quitting 00
To Want 00
Sarah Emma Edmonds 00
Eva Braun at Berchtesgaden 00
Lisa Fremont 00
Yang Gui-Fei 00
Seven Reasons for Divorce 00
On Sameness 00
Year of the Bombshell 00
Hong Kong Flower Lounge 00
Man in the White Truck 00
Preparations 00
KitchenAid Epicurean Stand Mixer 00
Edward Hopper Study 00
Hotel Room 00
Office at Night 00
Room in New York 00
Before 00
On Quitting 00
2. Five-Year Plan
The Laws of the Garden 00
Five-Year Plan 00
$4.99 All You Can Eat Sunday Brunch 00
The Goal 00
Chinese Speech Contest 00
Holiday Parties 00
An Evening at the Chinese Opera 00
Morning Porridge 00
At Lake Michigan 00
There Is Something about the East Coast 00
Golden Valley 00
First Halloween 00
Majority Rules 00
Mostly Ocean 00
Dragon Inn 00
3. Limits
Lantern Festival 00
Flight 00
The Tower of London 00
Seven Changs 00
Planting Tulips 00
Instinct 00
Damage 00
Gamble House 00
Human Inventory 00
Limits 00
Animal Models 00
Taiwan Independence 00
Grooming 00
Face 00
Meditation at Petoskey 00
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005 eISBN: 978-0-8093-8833-2 Paper: 978-0-8093-2618-1
Taking its concept of concentricity from the eponymous Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, Circle, the first collection from Victoria Chang, adopts the shape as a trope for gender, family, and history. These lyrical, narrative, and hybrid poems trace the spiral trajectory of womanhood and growth and plot the progression of self as it ebbs away from and returns to its roots in an Asian American family and context. Locating human desire within the helixes of politics, society, and war, Chang skillfully draws arcs between T’ang Dynasty suicides and Alfred Hitchcock leading ladies, between the Hong Kong Flower Lounge and an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch, the Rape of Nanking and civilian casualties in Iraq.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Victoria Chang’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Threepenny Review, Best American Poetry 2005, and other publications, and she is the editor of the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. She has earned degrees from the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford University, and is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Scholarship, a Kenyon Writer’s Workshop Taylor Fellowship, the Hopwood Award, and the Holden Minority Fellowship from the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. She resides in Los Angeles.
REVIEWS
Chang's poems concern themselves with, among numerous topics, the lives of women. Not just the Chinese American woman - daughter, mother, grandmother - but also women in general: athelte, "bombshell", business-woman, gardener, lover. As well as women in history and art: Sarah Emmon Edwards, who joined the Union Army as a man; Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress; Yang Gui Fei, "favored concubine" of a Chinese emperor; and women in Edward Hopper's paintings. Chang's techniques are confident and varied: the unbalanced couplet, with the first line always longer than the second to keep readers off balance; synesthesia for tension and lyricism; wry and muscular diction. The book's ending phrase is an homage to Chang's foremother in Asian American poetry circles, Cathy Song: "a thousand young larks mount the sudden breeze." A paean to healing.
— Vince Gotera, North American Review May-August 2006
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments 00
1. On Quitting 00
To Want 00
Sarah Emma Edmonds 00
Eva Braun at Berchtesgaden 00
Lisa Fremont 00
Yang Gui-Fei 00
Seven Reasons for Divorce 00
On Sameness 00
Year of the Bombshell 00
Hong Kong Flower Lounge 00
Man in the White Truck 00
Preparations 00
KitchenAid Epicurean Stand Mixer 00
Edward Hopper Study 00
Hotel Room 00
Office at Night 00
Room in New York 00
Before 00
On Quitting 00
2. Five-Year Plan
The Laws of the Garden 00
Five-Year Plan 00
$4.99 All You Can Eat Sunday Brunch 00
The Goal 00
Chinese Speech Contest 00
Holiday Parties 00
An Evening at the Chinese Opera 00
Morning Porridge 00
At Lake Michigan 00
There Is Something about the East Coast 00
Golden Valley 00
First Halloween 00
Majority Rules 00
Mostly Ocean 00
Dragon Inn 00
3. Limits
Lantern Festival 00
Flight 00
The Tower of London 00
Seven Changs 00
Planting Tulips 00
Instinct 00
Damage 00
Gamble House 00
Human Inventory 00
Limits 00
Animal Models 00
Taiwan Independence 00
Grooming 00
Face 00
Meditation at Petoskey 00
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC