Customer Reviews

Circle (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry)

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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.

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

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.

Circle is a collection of poetry by published poet and editor of "Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation" Victoria Chang. Poems encompass both the distant past, particularly laws, history, and customs of ancient China, and the muddled modern day. The female perspective, with its share of unique pains and mistreatments past and present, shines through in this interconnected anthology written with frankness and passion. Meditation at Petoskey: An old woman on the beach hands me a stone. / I tell her of the ruining landscape, tortoise backs / of stone, algae colonies, like puzzles on rock, / the lighthouse column with its cracked putty / and rotating eye. But she says, nothing has changed, / we have always been this way - a thousand young larks / mount the sudden breeze.

This is one book I'm really glad I did order. Every poem was engaging -- the standout poems, the OK poems, even the poems I felt could have been better realized. Each offered rewards. V Chang definitely offers significant things to learn from a poem-making point of view.

Certain poets make one feel the force of their mastery of one or two elements or strategems common to much good poetry, but which are particularly salient in theirs...Victoria Chang makes one feel the mastery of ... the laying out intelligent clues.

The strongest poems in the collection -- excellent poems by any standard -- were, for me, Yang Gui Fe, Eva Braun at Bershtesgarden, Kitchen Aid Epicurean Stand Mixer, and Lantern Festival. In these a whole life or lives seemed to hang on an image or line, and in almost any given poem, a sequence of deftly placed lines or images outline a deliberate "story" or subtext.

If there are weaker poems in the collection, it seems to me that the clues provided are meagre, arbitary; they don't connect with a sufficiently strong necessity to satisfy me. "The Laws of the Garden" is one; "The Goal" and "Majority Rules" are two others. However, the poem that first appeared in Slate, Holiday Parties, struck me in an annoying way as one of these, but a careful re-reading reveals it to be a remarkable depiction of the social pressures faced by a young woman coming of age in a Chinese American family in the incongruous context of socially-disconnected North America. So at this point word is out on a number of these "insufficient" poems; for me, perhaps, all they deserve is a careful re-reading.

Clearly, though, Circle is well worth reading, and re-reading... & Victoria Chang a talented poet worth watching...

-- from OUT OF THE WOODWORK,May 31, 2005

Circle does something few first books of poetry can: it moves from autobiographical material to the varied world outside the self, and yet the poems here hang together as the product of a strong, consistent voice. Early in the book, the sharp irony of "Five-Year Plan" is balanced and deepened by the bemused longing behind "Man in the White Truck." In the last section, the speaker's eye travels outward, as in "Lantern Festival," a stealthily shocking poem that collides beauty with horror - Chinese lanterns becoming, at the turn of a line, the heads of the dead during the Rape of Nanking. It's this kind of movement into the world, with its dangers and complexities, that surprised and moved me the most.

Victoria Chang's first book of poems was a pleasure to read. Alternatingly worldly and personal, and unfailingly sensual in terms of both her image/metaphor and language itself ("Some open like accordions,honoring the arrival of a newborn,/others hang still like moons"--from "Lantern Festival"), the poems in this ambitious first book do so much on so many different fronts.
This is a poet interested in the world around her (as attested to by the book's third section) while also tackling love relationships (first section) and family history/culture (middle section). And this is only her first book!

Victoria Chang's poetry is at once fierce and understated. Some of the best poems in the book deal poignantly with historical figures and events, such as "Seven Reasons for Divorce" ("Disobedience (to in-laws)/ I am the girl who wakes within an ocean,/ making winter melon soup for my mother-in-law,/ whose taste buds rise like thorns.") and "Lantern Festival," showing the scope of the poet's ambition. Yet Chang also entertains the reader with poems about pop culture icons from movies such as "Rear Window" and "Gone with the Wind," and allows startling intimacy in poems like "Five Year Plan." A young poet with impressive skills and a strong voice.

Victoria Chang won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award with this debut book. I found it because she was a featured poet in HYPHEN magazine's Winter 2011 article about contemporary Asian American Poetry. She seems to feel she's an "avant garde poet", out of the mainstream, and says in the article "I would never want to see Asian American poetry reach Billy Collins' level of acceptance, because at that point, you're reaching a different population and that's a different kind of art. That's more commercialism and it becomes about selling books. If you sell a ticket to a poetry reading and it's not for charity, that's not poetry anymore." Wow. Tell it to Mary Oliver, W.S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlighetti, or any number of poets (including Asian Americans Shailja Patel or Bao Phi) who have sold tickets to their shows. That strikes me as a bit pretentious. Maybe you don't want to be Billy Collins, but that doesn't mean that good poetry can't speak to the masses. Gee, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, anyone?

She also says she wishes to see less emphasis on story and narrative in Asian American poetry, and more on language and sound, to not get lost in the "politics and mission" of being Asian American.

I guess that should have forewarned me about her style. Other reviewers seem to like this book quite a bit. I found it lifeless, for the most part. I found I couldn't really attune to or even make much sense of her concerns. For example, she opens one poem with the headline about snipers in Washington DC, Malvo and Muhammed. She melds this with ducks being fearful of her at a swimming pool. "What if the ducks are right in fearing everything, even their own?" is her last, "money-maker" line. But the logic doesn't hold water for me; ducks don't fear everything. People should indeed at times fear their own, perhaps the point she is trying to make. But the pairing with ducks makes it almost a laughable, silly concern. Give me Nature Abhors Man, anyday, over that.

Technically, I'm sure this work is considered quite good. But I have a bias for poetry that takes one someplace. This work really didn't do it for me.

I read Victoria Chang's second book before I read Circle which gave me reason for pleasant surprise. You could easily be fooled into believing this work isA anything but a first book. There is cohesiveness in Circle that many poets have not mastered in their second or third publication.

In Circle Chang embraces an exposition of culture and gender in ways that are not worn or over worked. She demonstrates the spiral collision of past and future.

She is often edgy but her word skills have a well controlled precision that can slip a point past you like smooth butter.

I especially enjoyed the following poems: Lantern Festival, Seven Changs, To Want, Kitchen Aid Epicurean Stand Mixer and On Quitting.

Circle was a winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press.