Past Lives, Future Bodies

Description

31st Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalist (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.” Past Lives, Future Bodies is a knife-sharp and nimble examination of migration, motherhood, and the malignant legacies of racism. In this collection, family forms both a unit of survival and a framework for history, agency, and recovery. Chang undertakes a visceral exploration of the historical and unfolding paths of lineage and what it means to haunt body and country. These poems traverse not only the circularity of trauma but the promise of regeneration-what grows from violence and hatches from healing-as Chang embodies each of her ghosts and invites the specter to speak.

FROM TELEVANGELISM

In Chinese, ghost rhymes
            with expensive & mother

misspends her mouth
            on prayer with no payback, no god

bending our sky like a back.
            What a daughter costs

a mother must pay
            out of body: she reaches

into her blood
            like a wallet, a wound

we eat out of. She says
            one man’s daughter

is another god’s revenge: a river
            lassoes our local church & my body

expires mid-prayer.
            I wear my blood

as bracelets & go sleeveless
            on Sundays. When it rains, I cinch

the flood around my waist
            like a miniskirt. Say we’ll be better

mothers than our mothers. Say our fathers fit
            in our fists.