Studies in Betelnut Anxiety

By Carrie Chang

These Neo-nostalgic poems are mind-benders, celestial missives brought in from the stork with a starry, mandy angle, written with tick-tock deliberation and pride. With Sino-salvation and brusque dragon wings, they breathe on paper like literary holograms waiting to be devoured by time. Senti-ments of an eternal day-dreamer in plaid.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664140363

Carrie Chang

Carrie Chang was born in 1970, in Syracuse, New York. She attended Stanford University, UC-Berkeley and New York University, obtaining her B.A., and M.J. and M.F.A. in English and journalism and creative writing, respectively. She worked as an Asian American journalist in the arts/political field for almost a decade, creating her own magazine, “Monolid,” and lives as a writer/poet in the Bay Area. Her favorite pastimes include swimming and painting.

Book preview

CLAY-POT

R ainy alders, spurred

On by elderly pith, and

Wispy wasps of central

Light—-now freakily

Bend, as if in opal

Vanity, trendily gathering

The mottled leaves of scarred

History, for her belt

Of seventeen colors, and

Even others, feel

We had let down the brothers,

Ferns, of white soju

Forever, now cascade

With broken fingers,

Shi Zhong breaks just

Like that in a fringe

That too will linger

SOUL-SLACKING

S oul-Slacking into the better

Part of noon, I slip into

The white chrysanthemum haze

Of mourning my better years

Now cropped of their crisp

Yellow hedge; what was

Said or thought eludes

Me like a bibelot

Of transient desires,

Things forgotten

Or vanished

In the fires, as if tropes

Of our last lives

Could be singly felt

Like a q; this colorific

Peacock was like

An iron in the hair,

Wispy cadence

Of her worth, idylls

Forgotten at her birth

THE OUTSIDER

T here’s a reason

To genuflect under the wu-tong su

That’s dying under the October sun,

Gilded pretty as a picture

In a museum from

The broken city, from

Your last life, when

You had fast spoken words

Coming out of your pocket,

And asylum in your eyes,

And greater portents

To be a person whose

Addled sorrows could

Be felt in those willows,

Among the gained and spent

Hours by the grass, simple

Lives never