The term “Gruen Transfer,” named after some dead Austrian architect, defines the state of idealized hyperreality realized by deliberate reconstruction of a person’s surroundings. Every time you take that first step into a giant mall, there’s a small moment; a moment of disorientation and confusion as you survey the chaos of new surroundings, a moment when your objective intentions give way to the subjective and you surrender to the sublime (or, in the case of a mall, make terrible impulse purchases). This overly drawn-out analogy is the best tool I have to describe how it feels to encounter Michael Chang’s new collection Toy Soldiers.
Chang’s poetry is distinctive and agile from the first page, never quite letting you settle into a mood, never letting you get comfortable. The collection opens with “Drone Opting Out of the Hive.” In this address to an “eggshell plaintiff,” Chang gives us a glimpse of what will come to define this collection. We’re struck by the short, sharp, acerbic lines, monostiching their way down the page. These little chaos containers, as comfortable in isolation as they are with each other. As the collection continues it’s clear that Chang delights in rug pulling their readers. Just when you think you have a grasp on how a poem will unfold, Chang pivots with images turning themselves inside out and collapsing to create new momentums and constant readjustment. This is poetry of the unexpected, of the awake. In the world of Chang’s poetry, linearity is sleep, is boredom, is irrelevance. A poem is a shark. Keep swimming or die.
Through the agility of these lines, in the verve and the acid, the sardonic speakers, the reticence, there is tension. Chang flexes their wit and timing throughout the collection. The poems are littered with surprise, surreal grotesques; whether it’s a “council speaker using police lights & lip-syncing to call me maybe” or “the rat-boys from the chelsea projects” who, “collect teeth knocked from the president’s mouth.” This is world-building of the highest order. Or maybe its underworld-building. Or maybe, a new strange heave “disappearing into the evening.” Whatever it is, it invites you to come hither with its millennial red room allure, just don’t ever expect to leave.
While some see humor in poetry as an obfuscation or a means of distancing yourself from the elusive “discovery” within the poetic praxis, for Chang it is quite the opposite. This onslaught of the absurd and the scathing not only illuminates Chang’s ear for timing and tone, but also serves to fatten the reader up for the carving knives; the lines that know exactly when to cut you and then refuse to stop slashing. From “Saving the World”:
when he pulled me into bed
of coz i was wrong abt that, too
i mean falling asleep next to u
white linen shirt so flattering
not like my father’s
nope, not at all
Chang once said in an interview with Tupelo Quarterly that they see their work through the “prism of fashion,” finding themselves “really attracted to the high-low mix ….” This sensibility shines throughout these poems; giants of letters like Thom Gunn, Ai, and A. Van. Jordan sit happily alongside Lea Michelle, Dave Franco, Kobayashi, and “lesser Kennedys” in an all-singing, all-dancing post-modern cabaret. This is a poet who uses the timestamp as a foundation rather than something to avoid, an explicit rejection of other poets’ false pursuits of literary immortality. These are not timeless poems, these poems have a time and that time is now, goddammit. I could spend the rest of the review listing my favorite surprise references and the batshit anachronisms that made me spit out my coffee, but I won’t deny readers the pleasure of encountering them on their own. What’s more important is to see this collection in all its scope.
In Toy Soldiers, violence becomes a plaything, the intangible becomes tangible, the sacred becomes deconsecrated: “luv first requires anus” while “fiction is easy to sell to twats” and “the only sadder job than poet laureate / is former poet laureate.” The collection begins with a poet apologizing for their “clumsy words.” What looks like a qualification or placation is ultimately a set up. A set up for the overarching and enduring irony of the Toy Soldiers, a collection so deeply intentional and unapologetic with regard to poetry and the outside world.
Chang chooses to run head-first into the reflexivity and the soggy niche interior of writing life rather than write away from it: “if u want to make god laugh tell them ur a poet.” These snipes and asides, nestled amongst the sex and art, the big city and the small heartbreaks, paint a portrait of a writer unwilling to settle or be cast into a mold. Someone as at home with a flame thrower as they are with a microscope. From “The Loveliest Time”:
grief looks different for everyone
estranged husband uninvited to sit up front w. family
horses on the battlefield, immovable, weeping
this business w. the dominos behind us
breakdown or breakthru: don’t dare question me !!!
i know myself & have chosen another kind of attention
“i know myself & have chosen another kind of attention,” writes Chang, amidst another luscious, paratactical onslaught. A statement in parts heartbreaking and triumphant, but nonetheless undeniable. Much like the speaker within, Toy Soldiers is unexpected and knowing. A collection that both demands and deserves the kind of attention Chang conjures. A collection more than ready to hold that attention throughout its pages and well beyond.
Toy Soldiers, by Michael Chang. Louisville, Kentucky: Action, Spectacle; October 2024. 90 pages. $17.95, paper.
Jordan Hamel is an Aotearoa New Zealand writer and performer. He has an MFA from the University of Michigan. His debut poetry collection Everyone is Everyone Except You, was published in New Zealand by Dead Bird Books in 2022, and by Broken Sleep in the UK in 2024. He is the winner of the 2023 Sonora Review Poetry Competition, and the 2023 New Writers UK Poetry Prize. He was the runner-up in the 2023 American Literary Review Poetry Contest and a finalist for the 2024 BOMB Poetry Contest. Recent work can be found or is forthcoming in POETRY, Poetry Daily, Electric Literature, Pleiades, The Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.
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Heavy Feather Review 