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<\/p>\nReally Serious Literature, Sept. 9, 2021<\/p>\n
Paperback. $14.95.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Reading Michael Chang\u2019s Boyfriend Perspective <\/em>is like flipping through a fashion mag while reading a revolutionary\u2019s diary. The poems celebrate their own arrival, their own awesomeness, sometimes slipping in the center to admit their limitations and vulnerability, only to resurrect themselves with wit and biting self-awareness. Incorporating poems from Chang\u2019s 2021 chapbooks, Drakkar Noir<\/em> (Bateau Press) and Chinatown Romeo<\/em> (Ursus Americanus 2021), along with some new and previously uncollected work, Boyfriend Perspective<\/em> is queer, Asian American, observant, fun, critical, urgent, and knows more than you.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The space provided by a full-length collection allows Chang\u2019s work to explore a wider range of emotions and tones (bombastic to quiet), idea expansion (objects to emotions), and formal experimentation (free verse to haibun). Some of the best poems from each chapbook continue to function as anchors or whirlpool pieces that other poems in the collection get sucked toward or are stabilized by with linguistic or emotional resonance. The work is also a celebration of pop culture, queer life, queer sex, and the body as a sponge. The work situates itself in the world of Lindsay Lohan, mid-2000\u2019s internet blind items about closeted celebs, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Notley, Sean Lennon, Frank O\u2019Hara, Rick Ross, Bruce Weber\u2019s photography, Annie Prouxl\u2019s Brokeback Mountain<\/em>, Wayne Koestenbaum, Cornel West, and ultra-famous queer \u201980\u2019s supermodel and icon, Gia Carangi.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Chang\u2019s voice remains true to itself, at once contemptuous, teasing, and capricious, with moments of deep insight that feel like the cracking of an egg. One of the best qualities about their voice is its duality: a haughtiness and know-it-all attitude that rides shotgun with vulnerability, an anxiety that nothing will<\/em> change despite the voice\u2019s commands. The true emotion of the collection lies in the manic vacillation between ego and ego death. What is the modern experience but daily assaults of multiple validations and humiliations? Chang\u2019s speaker is in all of us.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The collection offers a range of styles and forms\u2014haibun, zuihitsu, short free-verse, all-caps list poems\u2014but long lines and more essayistic or block prose poems are at the heart of this collection. These long lines tell us something: the speaker is not interested in cutting themselves off. Stylistic capitalization choices feel right in poems where power, hierarchy, class, race, capitalism, and value systems are examined and thrown up against one another. A sometimes lowercasing of the lyric \u201ci\u201d speaks to the vulnerability of our normally bullet-proof speaker. In \u201cTwo Shakes of a Lamb\u2019s Tail,\u201d Chang writes, \u201ci\u2019ll miss him, i\u2019m sure, but \/ doesn\u2019t it just eat at you when a boy is too perfect?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cYankee Yellow\u201d is a prose block poem that looks to the reader to discern its patterns and associations. It\u2019s no accident that the poem\u2019s title is built from such loaded words; as the poem unfolds, the definitions of \u201cYankee\u201d and \u201cYellow\u201d start to expand, contract, or unravel as Chang places food, brand names, literature, and public figures alongside them, modifying their meaning. The repetition functions as a reminder that as far away as we wander from the phrase we are pushed back to its commanding presence. Maybe most importantly, Chang references the poet George Oppen: \u201cYankee Yellow Oppen\u2019s G-string\u201d and \u201cYankee Yellow New Rochelle\u201d (Oppen\u2019s hometown). Oppen, from the school of Objectivist poetry, provides a lens through which to think about Chang\u2019s work. Louis Zukofsky defined Objectivism in terms of its focus on sincerity and approach to poems as objects; however, that definition may be less helpful than looking at the work as a link between modernism and language poets. The Objectivist movement was staunchly left-leaning, interested in ethical poetry, and Oppen famously joined the communist party: \u201cYankee Yellow commie scum.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Chang\u2019s work hovers around the influences of Objectivism, language poetry, and the coolest, wisest graffiti you\u2019ve ever seen scrawled under a bridge: \u201cThere are two wolves named Dolce & Gabbana. First disarm them with \/ a compliment, defuse their racist anger.\u201d Chang\u2019s work becomes its own phenomenon complete with the peaks and valleys of vacillating popular trends. Each poem reads like a fashion fad or society spectating its own rise and fall, whipping in and out of style so violently that the somber truths that lie beneath emerge in gasping one-liners. In \u201cSqueeze,\u201d Chang writes, \u201cSometimes I feel like our relationship is two con artists trying to \/ con one another.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cIncendiary Chxnxmxn\u201d is a political language poem that appears as a code poem. When you solve for X, the first line of the poem\u2014\u201cAX XNGLXSH-CHXNXSX PHRXSXBXXK (1875)\u2014becomes \u201cAN ENGLISH AND CHINESE PHRASEBOOK (1875).\u201d The date is important, as it\u2019s not only the source of the found text below but also the date of the enactment of The Page Act (a precursor to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882), which outlawed the entry of Chinese women to the U.S. The Page Act is often cited as sexually motivated, a way to stop women of color from entering the U.S. and becoming \u201csexual threats\u201d across racial lines. Chang ends the poem with a purposeful mixing of commerce and sex: \u201cSXME MXN LXVX CXPXTXL \/ & SXMX MXN GXT PRXFXTS \/ BXY XS MXNY XS YXX LXKX \/ CXN YXX LXT MX SXX XT? \/ YXXR CXCK, X MXXN\u201d (\u201cSOME MEN LOVE CAPITAL \/ & SOME MEN GET PROFITS \/ BUY AS MANY AS YOU LIKE \/ CAN YOU LET ME SEE IT? \/ YOUR COCK I MEAN\u201d).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cAmerica\u2019s Sweetheart\u201d underscores this tension regarding objectification, dangerous power differentials, and politics in sexual and romantic relationships. \u201cIs Brett a human boy\u2026\u201d the prose poem begins, and though it\u2019s not punctuated as a question, it is one. It goes on to describe all the objects that surround Brett, the achievements he\u2019s earned, \u201chis hand up the skirt of some unsuspecting girl who thinks she has found the one.\u2026\u201d By these descriptors, we know Brett\u2019s class, race, and gender, and we\u2019re still questioning if he\u2019s human. We question it because at the end Chang warns, \u201cBrett is so happy though he never throws a tantrum in public but she doesn\u2019t know that Brett is an undecided voter.\u201d How can we be so close to someone and not know them politically? Who benefits from that separation? Cis, white, hetero women and privilege are clearly under scrutiny here; who else would have the \u201cluxury\u201d of not knowing their partner\u2019s politics?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In \u201cRage is Just a Number,\u201d the speaker again approaches themes of sex and objectification but this time places themself more in the spotlight: \u201cHe lets me touch him till he shudders. \/ I\u2019ve learned to feed the ducks within \/ me. They\u2019re always hungry. \/ I\u2019m the bag of old crusts, a vessel for \/ your hate: flip me over, turn me inside \/ Out. \/ You can journal your disappointment\/ later.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The speaker sees themself as something to be used, hated even, and in this moment our speaker is naming themself the object, \u201cI\u2019m the bag of old crusts,\u201d and giving permission to be objectified, \u201cflip me over, turn me inside\/out.\u201d Chang\u2019s work and speaker is showing us here how consent functions, how sex sometimes works as permissive momentary objectification\u2014how that\u2019s different than the other exchanges and objectification taking place in the collection.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n No one is safe from this speaker\u2019s criticism, not even poets. In \u201cAdverse Possession,\u201d Chang writes, \u201cNobody: \/ Absolutely nobody: \/ Poets: SELF-PORTRAIT AS.\u201d Critique is a form of protest, and Chang is asking for more\u2014more from poets, more from lovers, more from America, more from a failing society, more from you, dear reader: \u201csex is good, but have you ever fucked the system?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Chang\u2019s work, not unlike the abstract art it references, finds resonance in what\u2019s universal and yet is specific in its expression and vision. Questions that arise while reading Boyfriend Perspective <\/em>stay with the reader long after finishing the text: What happens when you live in a disposable culture? Do you dispose of yourself before anyone else can dispose of you? If everything is an object, should we objectify ourselves before anyone else does? In order to safeguard oneself from disappointment or disappointing others, should you state out loud you\u2019re disappointing or will disappoint? If we observe pop culture, will we become embedded in it? If we have sex do we become embedded in our lover? Is everything an exchange? or some kind of sale, or deal, including relationships? Is everything a trend or a moment, how do we know what moments are meaningful, or is that the point? None of it is more important? What if what or who you desire (by its very nature) will or wants to destroy you? Or what if who you love will never recognize your humanity? If your lover is shallow, should you be more shallow? Is your lover\u2019s racism, ethnocentrism, misogyny as certain as their indifference to your pleasure? Or is this complicatedly part of the pleasure? Is your lover\u2019s kiss no more valuable, no more intimate, than watching them shit? In the title poem, Chang writes, \u201csometimes it\u2019s freeing to love someone\/take off ur life jacket & plunge.\u201d With these instructions, we just might.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n After all the questions, the Lindsay Lohan references, the Brokeback Mountain<\/em> quotes, the rifling through and examining of culture and objects, we might wonder what is left? Chang writes on the last page of their collection, \u201chere is happiness \/ more or less \/ what saves us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Like flipping through a fashion mag while reading a revolutionary\u2019s diary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":6785,"template":"","categories":[9,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6782","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n