Past Lives, Future Bodies - Paperback

by Kristin Chang (Author)

2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist for 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."

Author Biography

Kristin Chang's work has been published in Teen Vogue, The Rumpus, The Margins (Asian American Writers Workshop), the Shade Journal, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net, and she has been anthologized in Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3 and Ink Knows No Borders (Seven Stories Press). She is a 2018 Gregory Djanikian Scholar (selected by The Adroit Journal), the recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, and a Resist/Recycle/Regenerate fellow with the Wing On Wo Project in Manhattan Chinatown. Past Lives, Future Bodies is her first chapbook.