Michael Chang’s TOY SOLDIERS was just published as winner of the Action, Spectacle poetry prize. Once again, Chang is producing bold, unapologetically sassy poems with a nod to the New York School (“my copy of lunch poems, white orange & blue...”). TOY SOLDIERS contains a delightfully dizzying array of poetic references like “go smoke a doobie norman dubie.” Chang invites the world into their poems where you’ll find Katy Perry, Ron Padgett, H.E.R., Richard Gere, Allen Ginsberg, Janelle Monáe, Liza Minnelli, Sid Vicious, “Cagney & Lacey,” Paul Klee, Chubby Checkers, Chelsea Handler, Olivia Munn, Phil Collins and Meg Ryan. And you’ll be reminded of the flimsy news stories we eat like candy—like Amy Schumer accused of cyberbullying Nicole Kidman.
TOY SOLDIERS is chockful of Chang’s signature text abbreviations and quotes from a diverse variety of artists including Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, Thom Gunn, Ai, Alfred Lord Tennyson, A. Van Jordan, John Wieners, Future, and The Cure to craft poems of sublime political awareness. Legal diction peppers their poems—defendants, plaintiffs, intellectual property, trade secrets, and res judicata. The book is worth its price for the prose poem “THE GLORIOUS GAIN,” a dishy (and frankly terrifying) look by the Supreme Court by an insider who’s clerked for two federal judges.
Chang can also serve up fabulously funky love poems like this:
SALON SONNET
take this into the bedroom
carry us to that boundary
the tabletop
a lazy susan of confusion
as if gnat or soft cheese
a furry wall
get out the knife
clothes & comebacks
r all i have left
plus the easy afterglow
of seeing u
which i now have
the ballet music
ringing ringing ringing
Congratulations, Michael!