Circle
by Victoria Chang
Review by A.E. Watkins

Victoria Chang's debut book of poems, Circle, presents an amalgamation of poetic voices. Not simply a collection of various female perspectives across the last few centuries, nor a litany of demographic identifiers conjoined by hyphens, her book mixes styles and perspectives. At their worst, Chang's poems suffer from under-wrought sentimentality and points of view that are over-simplified, while at their best, they straddle subtlety and alarm with a true talent.

Pound wrote that the poet must "consider the way of the scientist" whose value is ascertained once they have "discovered something." The formal elements of Chang's book are, at times, comfortable with hashing out old hypotheses. Over half the book is in couplets, with little in the way of syntactical variants or jarring line breaks. However, when Chang does affect her language with them, they come off as impressively accomplished. For example, in "Man in the White Truck," Chang expertly crafts these formal elements:

I am stalling on a stool at a coffee shop,

having what the next table thinks is boring shrimp
and cocktail talk with you. Or perhaps

I am in your truck, cutting air, an underbelly
of an aluminum can. How orange the earth is there,

so extraordinarily fire. And I wonder
why I am not on your list of the ten most stolen,

welding my dress into a prison. Some say
you have no heart, but it is beating you to death.

Here we see Chang utilize the manipulated syntax of "so extraordinarily fire" to bring the image's air close to our perception. In "welding my dress into a prison," Chang conveys the constrictions of cultural views of gender and how they illicit a personal imprisoning through conformity with ease and precision.

However, Chang doesn't always reach such excellence of poetics, or provide commentary on the limits of demographic labels with such grace. In poems like "Before" and "$4.99 All You Can Eat Sunday Brunch," we see the constraints of identification, whether cultural or gendered. The speaker attempts to break from these constraints with wit and truth. However, both poems lack the originality or uniqueness of perspective necessary to make the dramatic monologue effective. Instead, they feel decidedly familiar. In "$4.99 All You Can Eat Sunday Brunch," Chang repeats "I am" followed by a variety dishes, characters, and scenes from her father's chinese restaurant, which feels like discovered territory, even if she explores it with more talent. "Planting Tulips" is also decidedly familiar, even tired, and ends with a last line that is too sentimental for the subject:

Barbara Guest wrote in A Reason for Poetics, "The Poem is quite willing to forget its begetter and take off in its own direction. It likes to be spontaneous." She adds, "Some poets then become firm and send out admonitory hints. Others become anxious." In a portion of Chang's work there is this anxiety. In several poems a latent "I" or "my" is thrown in to the last stanza, as in "Lisa Fremont," "There Is Something About the East Coast," and "On Sameness." In the latter poem Chang employs Scarlett and Rhett from Gone With The Wind as symbols for their genders, but allows the speaker to insert their self in the last stanza:

But who's keeping time? Now I know why
We love old toys. Their women forgot how to
swallow ocean too, mopping it up instead.

To say, "this is why," keeps the focus on the speaker's symbols, instead of shifting the focus right at the end of the poem to the speaker's perspective of them. The extra layer does not provide a deeper reading.

In other poems, the reader is met with a stanza or line that is inappropriately dramatic or formally forced. In the poem "Sarah Emma Edmonds," Chang writes from the perspective of the historical figure who joined the Union Army under a male identity. Yet Chang undoes the heroic act of the woman with "I'd rather take a shot/ in the arm than to miss the Mediterranean// and all its marble," which seems a romantic sentiment that is, if nothing else, unlikely to be felt by a woman who fought in a war that took place on American soil.

In the poem "Lantern Festival," about the violence of the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, Chang forms the poem in couplets. She begins by describing lanterns for three stanzas, and then jars the form with a one lined stanza:

red ones line up in a row on a metal thread over scents
of sticky rice balls smoking in soup,

round ones glow in the wind, sockets firing up
one after another.

No! I am wrong, the round ones lash in the wind:

they are human heads, gutted and plucked from bodies that were snipping stalks of choy sum,

Though the violence of the form may be fitting, the exclamation point and italicized "lash" attempt to dramatize an event that is simply told to the reader. These prosodic implements do not allow the reader to experience the horror of the event. The language forces the event upon them. A more subtle approach, the slow dawning in the reader's awareness that the lanterns are heads, would prove more effective.

Yet, Chang often corrects her own missteps in other poems. In "Morning Porridge" she blends straight forward narrative with subtle prosodic elements to show the complicated relationship between a young girl, her father, and grandmother:

                       ...I handed her
the tray, glanced at the expanding

brown mass on her face. Day
after day, my father told me not to

wear white in my hair, not to leave
chopsticks vertical in a bowl of rice.

I did it anyway. One by one, I stole
the raisins from the box on her bedside table.

The last stanze evokes a complicated set of emotions. Nearly all of the previous sixteen lines are enjambed until we get to the chopsticks in the bowl of rice, which provides a rushing throughout the poem that abruptly stops for "I did it anyway." This lends the plain language of that line a complexity it would not have otherwise.

Chang's poem "On Quitting" displays well the mileage a poet can get from a subtle last line, a method precisely appropriate for the domestic context. Yet, "Animal Models" not only reveals a spot-on sense of tone, but also provides an adequate champion for the argument that more than beauty belongs in poetry.

Overall, Circle proves deserving of acclaim as a debut book. Victoria Chang displays to the literary world a true talent for expression, even if it is safely exhibited.