Past Lives, Future Bodies

2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist for Lesbian Poetry. In her debut short collection, poet Kristin Chang bursts onto the page and into our consciousness like a dazzling, dizzying uproar: I suck / until my teeth riot / with rot & I have nothing / left in my mouth to keep / quiet. Quiet Chang’s speakers are not. In these nineteen poems, the body is personal and communal, hunter and hunted: My mother says / women who sleep with women / are redundant: the body symmetrical / to its crime. Between your knees / I mistake need for belief / in a father figure: once, we renamed / our fathers by burning them / out of our bodies, smoking the sky / into meat.