#prescribee

[poetsandwriters]

Chia-Lun Chang, author of Prescribee (Nightboat Books, 2022), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, in “The Beauty of Being: Our Eighteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets.”

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Prescribee

By ​Chia-Lun Chang.

[queenspoetlore]

Oh how I love (lived) Chia-Lun Chang’s Prescribee! Not since my encounters with Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath, and Kamau Brathwaite’s Eleguas have I experienced the power of the (my) multilingual brain thinking out loud, unapologetic, across the pages of a book of poetry in English. This debut endtroduces to American poetry a disorientalist speaker whose accents float against nostalgia and longing for family members; foundering relationships and disrespectful advice; French military fantasy and obscure history; filariasis and naive American boys; creepy male American photographers; and the cold, cold heart of a green- card-denying government. Prescribee desires and laments a (Jan)US America whose “boundaries assimilate”/ “border crosses beef soup” yet also condemns whoever comes here for love (and chooses to remain after) to a struggle “with stacks of papers” “suppressed/shuddered” by “shredders/shelters.” Defiant “{l}ike a song/that has not been hurt,” Chang “lay{s} down” linguistically intricate lyric poetry and prose whose slippages summon the fruit mutations and matadoras of Frances Chung, Hsia Yü, and Sarah Gambito, while thrumming with the registers of the probing traveler of Chen Zhifan’s My America Journal. “Invisionable until//the empire murders itself,” Prescribee stands out for its darkly comic dreaming through the U.S. America, conjured in an “Engli-shhh” whose honey still burns my throat.

- Paolo Javier, author of O.B.B.