SAINTLESS
SAINTLESS
i wrote a poetry chapbook in 2022.
it’s about toxic flora and fauna, invasive species, sapphic body horror, girl saints, and all things rotten.
Chang's SAINTLESS insists on a fundamental rivenness: by history, by faith, by other bodies. Yet this rivenness is not only one of violence but also of ecstatic, rapturous metamorphosis that unfolds through spectacular encounters with the mundane always less ordinary than we believe. Chang imagines a mythos of self that mutates through representation and its many discontents—pop singers, actors on the silver screen, fairy tales, spiritual traditions, memories, all in living movement. SAINTLESS, if anything, teaches us to venerate perversely.
—Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of The Bone Setter (2019) and Paring (2020)
NIGHT MARKET IN TECHNICOLOR
NIGHT MARKET IN TECHNICOLOR
…and a micro-chapbook in 2020.
it’s about chinese mythology, moon goddesses, lineages, coming-of-age stories, and my favorite foods.
Overall, perhaps the most alluring aspect of this chapbook is Chang’s ability to braid together these various threads, ensuring a cohesive collection, while also delving into a variety of different poetic structures. I’m drawn to those pieces that move across the page, manipulating temporality in each instance of indentation, cascading neatly into different images and scenes. And there are also poems that stretch into long, narrative lines—moments that are more certain, definite… these concrete structures complement those that are flickering and more surreal.
—Alycia Pirmohamed, Winner of the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize, in The Ex-Puritan
WHERE ELSE
WHERE ELSE
…i’m also in a poetry anthology.
it features both established and emerging hong kong poets across generations and continents.
“These are the people’s poems: Filling our hearts and minds with empires past and dreamscapes of the present: Cantonese opera wafting through windows, the buzz of taxis and street hawkers, landmark pagodas, magical star ferry rides and endless kettles of chrysanthemum tea, dim sum and noodle shops… Our poetry is the ultimate expression of freedom and is a harbinger of all that is wondrous and possible!”
—Marilyn Chin, Winner of the 2020 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize