Circle (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry) [Paperback]

Victoria Chang (Author)

Book Description

Series: Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry | Publication Date: March 3, 2005

Taking its concept of concentricity from the eponymous Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, Circle, the first collection from Victoria Chang, adopts the shape as a trope for gender, family, and history. These lyrical, narrative, and hybrid poems trace the spiral trajectory of womanhood and growth and plot the progression of self as it ebbs away from and returns to its roots in an Asian American family and context. Locating human desire within the helixes of politics, society, and war, Chang skillfully draws arcs between T’ang Dynasty suicides and Alfred Hitchcock leading ladies, between the Hong Kong Flower Lounge and an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch, the Rape of Nanking and civilian casualties in Iraq.

 

 

 

 

(20060501)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Emerson claims in his essay ‘Circles’ that ‘the past is always swallowed and forgotten.’ But Victoria Chang, in her superb first book Circle, interrogates a substantial portion of what Emerson would erase: the tyranny of Maoist China and the Red Brigade, the remote reserve of her Asian American family, her own experience in high finance and the jet-set 90s, and so much more. Nothing’s too large or small for this alchemical poet, from a Kitchenaid mixer to Eva Braun at Berchtesgaden 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, author of Changeable Thunder

“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, author of Waterborne

“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 poems, from a poet we are now very privileged to hear from.”—Rick Barot, author of The Darker Fall

 

“[It’s] a real pleasure to find a first book that thinks big, that harbors the best sort of ambitions, not to be acclaimed, but to stretch itself. [Circle] frequently brings Randall Jarrell to mind, both in its wide range of subjects, including art, film, and history, in its many dramatic monologues, and particularly in its fundamental inquiry into the slippery nature of identity. . . . As Chang continues her explorations, it will be not only comforting but also exhilarating to watch her transformations toward full maturity as a poet. Certainly, her first book promises delights to come.”        —Blackbird

     Chang''s poems concern themselves with, among numerous topics, the lives of women.  Not just the Chinese American woman - daughter, mother, grandmother - but also women in general:  athelte, "bombshell", business-woman, gardener, lover.  As well as women in history and art:  Sarah Emmon Edwards, who joined the Union Army as a man; Eva Braun, Hitler''s mistress; Yang Gui Fei, "favored concubine" of a Chinese emperor; and women in Edward Hopper''s paintings.  Chang''s techniques are confident and varied:  the unbalanced couplet, with the first line always longer than the second to keep readers off balance; synesthesia for tension and lyricism; wry and muscular diction.  The book''s ending phrase is an homage to Chang''s foremother in Asian American poetry circles, Cathy Song:  "a thousand young larks mount the sudden breeze."  A paean to healing.

(Vince Gotera North American Review May-August 2006 )

About the Author

Victoria Chang’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Threepenny Review, Best American Poetry 2005, and other publications, and she is the editor of the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. She has earned degrees from the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford University, and is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Scholarship, a Kenyon Writer’s Workshop Taylor Fellowship, the Hopwood Award, and the Holden Minority Fellowship from the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. She resides in Los Angeles.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press; 1st edition (March 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809326183
• ISBN-13: 978-0809326181
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,496,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars for Circle, September 12, 2005

By 

Susan Olding (Vancouver, BC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Circle (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry) (Paperback)

In charting a path of departure from, and return to the poet's Chinese-American roots, Circle encompasses a daring range of subjects and moods, and does so in language that is at once suggestive and precise. Here is a poet whose sympathies are wide enough that she can find herself in almost anything -- from the cycles of a shiny KitchenAid mixer, "dancing in circles, spinning around and around," to the crack in the toilet seat of her family's restaurant. Here is a poet whose imagination is bold enough that she can inhabit the souls of characters otherwise known to us only through the impersonal narratives of history or the daily news -- a woman who has enlisted as a man in the Union army, Eva Braun anticipating Hitler's arrival in her bedchamber, a divorcée during the Shang Dynasty (1765-1123 BC), a contemporary banker charged with obstruction of justice, or Lady Jane Grey in her "gemmed neck" -- soon to be severed from her head on the executioner's block. Everything is connected Chang seems to say, with her sometimes surprising choice of subjects; our wants are an "infinite accordion," and even the nose on my face, which seems so uniquely my own, won't die with me, but instead "will ever last/ somewhere in someone." Technically assured, sharply imagined, wryly observed, and always honest and deeply felt, Circle is a first book that will reward re-reading.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best poetry titles I've read this year., September 17, 2007

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Circle (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry) (Paperback)

Victoria Chang, Circle (Crab Orchard Review, 2005)

Every once in a while, I stumble upon a book like Circle (I say "stumble" because at this point I've no idea where I read about it originally), and all the time I spend reading poetry that ranges from the mediocre to the mind-splittingly awful is worth it. For Circle is one of those books where the poems leap off the page and come at you with a boning knife, gazing hungrily at the innards lying beneath that flap of belly fat you've been trying so hard to work off these past few years. While this is not happy stuff, for the most part, Chang manages to retain a twisted sense of humor about life, the universe, and everything:

After returning from Arkansas, I've never been the same.
Little here, little there, it's always great

to go à la carte-- it gives leverage and leave, it lends option to pull out
that front tooth or start saying y'all.

I begin to acknowledge feet with hair on the big toes, my eyes
get greener and green.

Periodically, there's a 300-point inspection and I'm checked,
re-checked, and checked again,

but what if the checker is the one missing a tooth? What if
I discover this

when I'm more than halfway? Do I turn back or keep going away
from home--

two small dots plucking broken guitars?
("Majority Rules")

Oh, yes, folks. I am unabashed in my love for this book, which will most likely make my top ten reads of the year. You want it. **** ½

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Emerging Poet Victoria Chang, November 30, 2006

By 

peter ackoff (claremont, ca United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Circle (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry) (Paperback)

What I love about Ms. Chang's work is her directness and her intensity. Though she said in an interview in June of this year that she would like to be more daring, I find her sense of political and social outrage infuses even the simplest of domestic situations, a fully committed kind of daring, as in this description of a rice dish the speaker prepares in "The Dragon Boat Festival" interwoven with a revelation about murdered baby girls: " I snip the string, unwrap the leaves, the rice pulses with steam, black dates ache, the wind smells of wet grass, sugar, fractured flesh." This is a wonderful book by an emerging poet who will become one of our nation's finest.