Leslie C. Chang's poems have appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Literary Imagination, and other publications. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
These poems move with poise and a painterly precision through the
realms of history, elegy inheritance and loss. They are a map you
can trust--if what you seek is "an eternity," to cross "the narrow
portal between seasons" and "be led back out in amazement." I am
arrested again and again by the beauty and devotion coursing
through these lines. -- -Tracy K. Smith
What is family history, after all, but the stories we overhear?
That is what I thought as I read Leslie C. Chang's Things That No
Longer Delight Me with its quiet yet powerful interweaving of past
and present, of reclamation and loss, of histories whispered and
revealed. Her poetry is, to quote one of her lines, a process of
memory and bone. In a field of strong contenders littered with
beautifully written poems dedicated to craft, Things That No Longer
Delight Me is a book in which craft is put to use for a better
purpose; to tell a story which needs to be told. It's a beautifully
lyric time machine.----Cornelius Eady, University of Notre
Dame
Leslie Chang's several images of trapped light remind me that if
you open a kaleidoscope and shake the contents onto your palm, you
will discover an assortment of, say, charms and sequins. In this
first book, she has collected ordinary things to dazzle the
reader--battered planet, aerogramme, jackdaw in azalea, the
requisite jade bracelet--then mixes them into the poetry of family
history and personal habit. Things That No Longer Delight Me is
sure to delight the reader.----Kimiko Hahn, author of The
Narrow Road to the Interior
In their mix of tenderness, delicacy of observation, their feel for
textures, their refined and refining intelligence, all brought to
bear by a robust sensibilty that doesn't flinch in the face of the
harder matters of absence, loss, grief, the poems of Leslie Chang
compose a complete, remembered, lived-in world . . . Unmarked by
rhetorical showiness, Chang's pitch-perfect sketches enter
unobtrusively into the lives of her family elders with a profound
understanding, the result of contemplation, patience, silence.
Taken together, the poems compose an elegiac celebration of family
life-bridging two or three generations, two countries, two
different worlds, all realized at a distance and in memory, and
brought back to life in these brief, brilliant conjurings. 'You
knew how to receive a guest,' she says in one poem: 'With a gift.'
In Things That No Longer Delight Me, Leslie Chang offers us many
such welcoming gifts, all wrapped in what she justly calls 'the
language of the here and now.' -- -Eamon Grennan
Chang explores her heritage, and she reimagines lives with devotion
and loyalty. * -Publishers Weekly *
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