Gracing the cover of Victoria Chang’s slender book of poetry The Boss (McSweeney’s Poetry Series 2013) is what looks to be a photograph of a spotless knight in shining armor, scepter raised high in powerful triumph. Yet upon inspection of the cover credits, the “photograph” is revealed to be a photorealistic pencil drawing by Karl Haendel. Chang resides in Southern California with her family, straddling the business world and creative writing education. In The Boss, she pens single page poems about corporate New York, motherhood, 9/11, Edward Hopper, and her ailing father. Like the cover, her sparse poems appear to be straightforward in presenting linear narratives. However, her careful details and jarring imagery outline meaningless systems of capitalist labor without satisfying alternatives.
In the first poem, “I Was Once a Child,” Chang recalls the year her father “lost his words to a stroke,” and how his employer’s response was to fire him. For the rest of the book, Chang gently surfaces the monotony, violence, and most of all, absurdity, of being a worker cog in corporate America. She repetitively references the faceless character of “the boss” to represent not only her managers, but the capitalist condition to which we all, as wage-earners, agree to in exchange for money to survive. In “We Are High Performers,” Chang makes a mockery of the spectacle of performance reviews in the business world and the impossible standard of a never-ending, increasing worker productivity. She writes, “we are high performers former high hopers on a high wire / balance a ream of paper on our heads / no net under us just the boss with her arms crossed.”
In “We Can’t Say Anything,” Chang references her father’s former job as an ac- count manager (“ass-kissing for his large accounts”), but that his failing memory can no longer retrieve his own passwords or earnings for those accounts. At the same time, she reflects on her relatively new identity as a mother and her position as an authority figure to her young daughter. In “The Boss Wears a White Vest,” she admits to us, “my four-year-old daughter still /listens to me I am the boss and I like it I / see why the boss likes.” For Chang, the economic structure that allows one person to wield power over another is inherently dehumanizing. She asks, why do I accept this status quo… why do we all? Why do we expend so much energy trying to get on HR’s good side, monitoring our 401(k)’s, writing emails in Outlook, collecting office supplies, and letting our bosses break our spirits? As corporate workers, these are questions we must allow ourselves to ask ourselves, if we are to get closer to an understanding of what it is to be human. Without ranting, The Boss is a thoughtful, digestible meditation on corporate urban life and the descending stair of compromises required to pursue a hollow American Dream.
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e f g (exchange following and gene flow): a trilogy (Action Books, 2016) is Brooklyn-based contemporary poet and performer Valerie Hsiung’s third book of poetry. This trilogy brims with sharply unexpected wordplay and strategic line breaks and whitespace. It is a book that demands the reader’s patient engagement and close reading. The inscription at the end of the book provides key clues on the subjects and voices in her writing: “for all the lost and for all the survivors / of systemic geopolitical, sexual, socioeconomic and, / more than ever, speciest abuse and torture / for all the lost and for all the survivors forced into captivity, homelessness and hunger.” There is a thread of suffering that runs taut through every stanza to represent the broken, cruel world in which all we exist.
In “Rape Kit,” the speaker is presumably talking about her rapist: “you are the saint of torture / your entire life has never done anyone any harm.” Rape culture sells the narrative that the female victim/survivor did something to deserve this violence, and the perpetrator is a decent guy who merely made a poor decision. Near the end of the piece, the speaker states that “it’s an honor to be killed by you.” It is unclear whether she is referring to inhabiting a physical or spiritual death- either way, the profound damage has been done. In “try,” the speaker describes the disjointed existence of a life that continues after trauma, telling someone that “you will regain feeling, it could / take a while but you’ll regain. / you may need to sleep more than usual, sleep without guilt … if you can.”
For the most part, these poems are not easy to read due to their loose forms and non sequitur interjections. Hsuing invites us in to experience them anyway, because the world also is not easy and existence in it requires regular examination via use of language that resists rules and disciplinization. There is a logic to the English language and traditional poetry that is imposed upon every subject in Western society, and the foundation of this logic resides in white hetero able-bodied patriarchy. Women, people of color, LGBTQ people, rape survivors, disabled people, immigrants, Muslims, and other minority groups live and struggle under this real- ity of subjugation, which has become exponentially more apparent under this new U.S. administration. In “e f g”, Valerie Hsuing defies these dominant forces with the tools at her disposal: language, mythical sources, space, nothingness, arrangement. She shocks the reader’s mind with ice water, trickling away tired expectations, and leaving a surface open to clarity and new forms of meaning-making.
Originally published on The International Examiner.