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 LIZ
CHANG
Liz Chang's second book of poetry and translations What
Ordinary Objects is forthcoming from Book-Arts Press.
Her work has been included in several anthologies and literary
magazines, including APIARY magazine, Breakwater
Review and Philadelphia Stories. Her translations
from French have recently appeared in The Adirondack
Review.
Poet
Leslie Ullman said of her first book, Provenance:
"Liz Chang's poems remind us that ordinary life is
only apparently so, as it offers up disjunctions and provocations,
undercurrents of violence, and moments of fierce sensuousness
to someone willing to observe them with a forthright gaze.
These are the poems of a poet fully awake to what goes on
within her and around her, and she renders all of it, through
restraint and consistently fresh metaphors, as macabre but
not threatening, necessitating a measure of courage, and
ultimately familiar."
Chang
received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2008
and she has been a member of the Montgomery
County Poetry Wordshop (founded by Grant Clauser and
Joanne Leva) since 2010. Liz works as an Assistant Professor
of English at Delaware County Community College. She lives
with her fiancé and their two cats en les environs
of Philadelphia.
Statement from 2012 MCPL Celebrity Judge
Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno:
"Liz
Chang’s compelling poems explore themes like the
frailty and temporality of the human body, the inevitability
of death, and the responsibility of family as witness.
They contain surprising metaphorical shifts and lurches
as in “Water Main,” where the foreman emerging
from the pit becomes the surgeon emerging from the table
with the speaker’s mother’s blood on his septum.”
Some of the poems express both the beauty and the entrapment
of sexual desire and the need for intimacy. And throughout,
Chang gifts us with her imagery -- beautiful , fluid images
of suspension, floating, water and the sea -- the speaker
who grows gills and “drowns kissing air,” or
contemplates the “lavender wash of the empty fields,”
or who takes a photo of you, with “your grown up
watch/ resting against the tank of ethereal jellyfish.
Chang’s poetry is riveting and ambitious – I’m
honored to introduce her as the 2012 Montgomery County
Poet Laureate."
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