"Lantern Festival"
from Victoria Chang's
Circle

Victoria Chang:

Victoria Chang’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2005, The Nation, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, New England Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is the editor of an anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (The University of Illinois Press, 2004). She has received a Breadloaf Scholarship, a Taylor Fellowship from the Kenyon Writer’s Workshop, a Hopwood Award, as well as a Holden Minority Fellowship from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. She holds other degrees from the University of Michigan and Stanford. She resides in Los Angeles and will be attending USC's Ph.D. program in literature and creative writing program in the fall. (Photo by Todd Terlecki)

About Circle:

Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Open Competition Award

“Emerson claims in his essay ‘Circles’ that ‘the past is always swallowed and forgotten.’ But Victoria Chang, in her superb first book interrogates what Emerson would erase: the tyranny of Maoist China, her Asian American family, her experience in high finance, and so much more. Nothing’s too large or small for this alchemical poet, from a KitchenAid mixer to Eva Braun to the most serene rendering of an oceanside landscape. Her technical skills are flexible and powerful, her voice is fearless yet capable of great lyrical tenderness, and her vision — global, principled, sympathetic — is a gift to contemporary poetry in America during a needful time.”
— David Baker

“A thirst for the self / in everything — even / in the sweet chinks of mandarin....” This does not sound like a first book, does it? With astringent understatement and wry economy, with nuance and intelligence and an enviable command of syntax and poetic line, Victoria Chang dissects the venerable practices of cultural piety and self-regard. She is a master of the thumbnail narrative. She can wield a dark eroticism. She is determined to tackle subject matter that is not readily subdued to the proportions of lyric. Her talent is conspicuous, and this book a most impressive debut.”
— Linda Gregerson

“Victoria Chang’s Circle denotes a geometry of enclosure that brings into itself all the fractious identities of contemporary American life. The lives of women, immigrants, artful self-making — all these are investigated and sung into newness by her canny poems. Time and again the astringency of her lines arrives at a clarifying lyricism, restoring a complex mystery to the everyday. This is a book of powerful, empowered poems, from a poet we are now very privileged to hear from.”
— Rick Barot

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