IN THE MANY courses on "leadership" being offered across this wide and deluded land, does poetry ever occur on a syllabus? Rarely if ever, I would assume. I just did a Google search for "poems about leadership" and found Kipling's "If" (no surprise), Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (hmm), and Hughes's "A Dream Deferred" (what?), so I am guessing no one who teaches leadership classes has given this possibility much thought.
Well! Let me recommend to all teachers of leadership that they offer their students this slim volume of poems from 2013. The poetry is excellent. Chang adopts a tumbling, unpunctuated flow that makes a good match for the churning moil in the consciousness of a worker. The language sparkles with playful wit but also has an iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove satiric wallop. The book's really great accomplishment, though, is its making radiantly plain how workers feel about bosses, even modern, enlightened bosses. And that is something every would-be leader ought to know.
The Boss also includes several ekphrastic poems base on Edward Hopper paintings, whose night time urban office interiors make a perfect complement to walls-closing-in claustrophobia of the "Boss" poems.
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