The University of Vermont's Independent Voice Since 1883

The Vermont Cynic

The University of Vermont's Independent Voice Since 1883

The Vermont Cynic

The University of Vermont's Independent Voice Since 1883

The Vermont Cynic

Rich language of laureate Tina Chang explored at the Fleming

?

The Fleming Museum hosted Tina Chang on March 28 as part of the monthly Painted Word Series led by professor Major Jackson.

 Varied speakers presented her poetry to the audience.

In Tina Chang’s second book of poetry, “Of Gods and Strangers,” the taste of the discoveries made in Chang’s poems lingers with the audience.

The sounds and images in Chang’s collection are electric: we are drawn across borders and time, and when we reenter the world, we remember vividly what we experienced in the lives of the poems.

A current Brooklyn poet laureate, Tina Chang writes with a richness and lucidity that extends throughout her poems and with a collectivity that claims us. 

We become one with the Empress dowager, the young girls, the first-person speaker in a club whose clear voice seems to rise up from the shadows. 

As the audience of the poems in “Of Gods and Strangers,” we experience such an intimacy with the experiences and atmospheres created that it is almost as if we, too, become written into the collection by its conclusion.  

The constant tendency to view ourselves through others is the theme of twinning that guides us through the many colors and backdrops of Chang’s “Of Gods and Strangers.

 The image and concept of masks that emerges throughout the collection embeds an additional layer to the collection. 

Masks and twins relate to one another because the first-person speaker sees herself as twinning the powerful Empress Dowager herself.

And thus we become seated even deeper into Chang’s speakers’ voices.  

A sense of danger weighs on the speakers throughout the collection. 

We dip in and out of positions, moments and people of power.

We navigate through books with our names in them and through peach trees bearing fruit that seem both sweet and scary.  

In “Bitch Tree,” the child speaker hails nature. Shatteringly alive, the speaker propels our awareness of our own senses and presence in the moment with a voice that demands our attention with lines like, “Love me when all the ripe clusters drop.”

Consumed by the mythologies that arise in the various speakers’ connections with the spiritual, natural and historical worlds, the many masks in “Of Gods and Strangers” become, too, a semblance of an ever-watching god.  

We journey with company when we travel through the realms of the many “gods” and “strangers” that inhabit Chang’s collection.

Leave a Comment
More to Discover

Comments (0)

All The Vermont Cynic Picks Reader Picks Sort: Newest

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Activate Search
Rich language of laureate Tina Chang explored at the Fleming