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Overview
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780809388332 |
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Publisher: | Southern Illinois University Press |
Publication date: | 03/03/2005 |
Series: | Crab Orchard Series in Poetry |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 80 |
File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
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.
Read an Excerpt
TO WANT To wait is to want more. Or to think you want more. Take a look backyard for the stitches that seam everything together. It's unruly back there, yes, but when there is time, weedswant and want, an infinite accordion-to want what they cannot have, no mirrors to show them how they look or lie. How many toys do children need? For my home, a rug, yoga mat, clear wax candles, bath rack with bubble crystals, a man. You are not for sale, but other women do not know this. You do not bother telling them. I am tempted to dial each of them up, to inform them (because of my compassion) of their safety violation. Wait. Dig a garden. Eat only junk food. Buy a strange pet with short legs. Always pick up the phone when you call. HONG KONG FLOWER LANGUAGE They say fat finds the female brain, while the heart remains thin. And it was as if the waitresses knew my plan to win him from her, or at least to test him out. I blamed my lack of progress on the waitresses (pushers of carts). They returned, a finding-lost-money obsession.Glass of water? Chicken feet?Pork bun? As if to say, help, we must extinguish her. I wanted him to tellher about our autumns in Vermont (well not really, but close enough), the autumns in his mind of Vermont, or the Vermont in my autumn- any combination to avoid lines, the shopping mall of men. And it didn't matter that I recently had my stomach pumped of cheating ones, the spraining-of-the-heart kind. Who said good habits pay off later? They just left me on the couch alone, watching the best of the new season, the hottest gadgets and ab-crunchers. Your skin is the only suit you'll have for a lifetime. Mine, the darkest shade- darker than the fish's eye. EDWARD HOPPER STUDY: ROOM IN NEW YORK The woman's finger hangs above the F key. She always wears the same red dress. The man's hands cup the newspaper edge, his face ashen, half-edible. The woman's back to the man, head down, her arm, dairy and bloated, long before men preferred peeling brown shoulders, the midriff. She can't leave him, doesn't know how. How many times have you heard this? You will hear itagain and again, like the F key that in a moment will glaze the room with its throbbing mouth. THE GOAL My father's body curled like a fist as he perched over the pavement, unhandsome with manuals and parts, brackets and backboard. He was lost in the alleys of his city, where genetics still mattered, and alleles meant pair. One dusk, the backboard mounted against the moon, against crickets working. I tossed the ball, watched the net open its walls. Each night, I barreled to the net with ease, found the unfindable opening, until the pole shifted in the mud, like my father's eyes when he knew I was getting too good. SEVEN CHANGES At night your growth rate doubles and each morning I spot yet another Chang in the newspaper, staring at me with its dull lamps. I limp up a mountainside towards a growing opal. Oracle, is this the way up to the little office with orange lights? Let's not argue this time. For the last time, we argued over the arrival of another Victoria Chang. Changed from Valerie to Victoria and now my ruin, for she, a track star, runs faster than a seashore. Shared bunks were never favored by me, a has-been-girl or even worse, a not-yet-girl. And don't even mention the others- faces smashed against the door, Helen Chang, Heather Chang, Hilary Chang. And with each new Chang, the shock of the world goes down, drawn to the next eyeless eel or the one-legged constellation. The next seven Victoria Changs, all victorious, in rows, each a little taller than the last. Their fevered footsteps persist, fist me into midnights.
Table of Contents
CONTENTSAcknowledgments
Part One: On Quitting
To Want
Sarah Emma Edmonds
Eva Braun at Berchtesgaden
Lisa Fremont
Yang Gui Fei
Seven Reasons for Divorce
On Sameness
Year of the Bombshell
Hong Kong Flower Lounge
Man in the White Truck
Preparations
KitchenAid Epicurean Stand Mixer
Edward Hopper Studies
Hotel Room
Office at Night
Room in New York
Before
On Quitting
Part Two: Five-Year Plan
The Laws of the Garden
Five-Year Plan
$4.99 All You Can Eat Sunday Brunch
The Goal
Chinese Speech Contest
Holiday Parties
An Evening at the Chinese Opera
Morning Porridge
At Lake Michigan
There Is Something about the East Coast
Golden Valley
First Halloween
Majority Rules
Mostly Ocean
Dragon Inn
Part Three: Limits
Lantern Festival
Flight
The Tower of London
Seven Changs
Planting Tulips
Instinct
Damage
Gamble House
Human Inventory
Limits
Animal Models
Taiwan Independence
Grooming
Face
Meditation at Petoskey