Things a Bright Boy Can Do

In Michael Chang's latest, all the world's a vaudeville stage, and this poet is its jester with a knife.

Like an elongated diss track, Chang's poems go from flirty to righteous, wrathful to lackadaisical, all in the span of one page.  The  titans  of  pop  culture  and  poetry  wrestle  at  Chang’s  whimsy, their poems a series of flings and retorts at the end of a late-night spree. 

Like a compendium of American poetics, this collection breezily changes style and mood as easily as a prom queen smiles beneath the crown. With nods to O’Hara and Ashbery, the poems in Things a Bright Boy Can Do flit from the sewage of Americana to the heights of ecstatic experience. Each poem is a playground meant to delight readers before they skip along. 

With each successive book, Michael Chang showcases a poet at home in the twenty-first century; nothing is too silly or too morbid for the page. When  reading  Chang’s  poetry,  the  madness  of  interpreting  the  social media age suddenly makes sense. You can’t help but join in on the heckling, sticking your tongue out in the face of our strange world.

“Michael Chang is back, with their signature irrepressibility: the voice that bubbles with endlessly exuberant wit, encyclopedic pop culture references, playful orthography, and intense emotion. Oh, yes -- these poems are in their feelings! Are you here for poetry that can lure Superman, Dolly Parton, and Prince allusions together? Are you up for parataxis with a vengeance? If wordplay and irreverence are music to your ears, tune into Things a Bright Boy Can Do.” – Evie Shockley, author of Suddenly We

“Michael Chang’s Things a Bright Boy Can Do pushes and pushes, and then pushes some more. It’s provocative, fearless, and relentless, unafraid to reinvent tone, grammar, and just about everything else that dares to enter the path of Chang’s perception. Things a Bright Boy Can Do is a ride on the back of a new modern language.” – Victoria Chang, author of The Trees Witness Everything