HER FOURTH BOOK of poems, from 2017. That's "Barbie" as in the iconic doll, ironically deployed here since the book has much to say about the humiliations of assimilation. Many of the poems cast Chang as suburban mom trying to fit in with the other suburban moms somewhere in the whiter-than-mayonnaise Midwest, and not making it very far. The other suburban moms of the neighborhood constitute the ominously named "Circle," and try as Chang might to join, the Circle is impenetrable. She is just not sufficiently Barbie.
The verse here is quite a bit like that of The Boss, the headlong unpunctuated rush of a mind that can't quite keep up with itself, making a thousand associations a minute, lighting up with verbal juggling ("mimesis" and "mimosas"!), yet also wielding a satiric sword edge that will slice and dice you before you know what's happening.
As with Dear Memory, I found myself wondering: where is the husband? Is Barbie Chang a single mom? And who is P.? The second and fourth sections are sonnets addressed to a "P.", and in good sonnet fashion they suggest romance, perhaps an illicit romance, without being very direct about it.
Then it occurred to me that "P." might be Poetry, in that a suburban mom who is also a poet probably has to guard her writing as though it were a clandestine affair, as if devotion to poetry was a kind of adultery. What Barbie has time to write--or reason to write? What Barbie "wishes to win the Guggenheim like / Paul Muldoon to doom // others like Paul Muldoon to write / rejection letters sending // them out the New Yorker windows." Barbie Chang does. (And Victoria Chang, let us note, now has won a Guggenheim and been published in the New Yorker.)
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