The Curator's Notes

By Robin Rosen Chang

A gorgeously deft book, The Curator's Notes dares to question the Edenic. It asks, why not take the knowledge at hand hanging like "plump, purple orbs...begging to be eaten..."? And what can we grow with states of paradise being ever fleeting? This curator is a custodian of both specific and collective heritage, connecting dau

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terrapin Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781947896383

Robin Rosen Chang

Robin Rosen Chang's poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, North American Review, Cream City Review, The Cortland Review, Vinyl Poetry, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A native of Philadelphia, she has lived in different parts of the U.S. and overseas. She now lives in northern New Jersey where she is an adjunct professor of English as a second language at Kean University. An earlier version of this collection was named a finalist for Warren Wilson's 2018 Levis Alumni Award for a manuscript in progress. This is her debut full-length collection.

Book preview

My Mother Was Water

She used to say they didn’t know how

she got pregnant with me

because my father was married to his work.

I think about them,

how he and his work might have dined together—

my father in his blue and white polka-dotted bowtie

across from work, a mess demanding,

Look at me! I need you to do this now!—

and where they would’ve slept, the space

work took up in bed. But really, I knew

my mother, so turbulent. She was

water—a river, torrid,

and trying to flow uphill,

and he, a dam at the bottom

imploring gravity—Pull down

her wild current!

I think I was a pebble between them,

too light to lodge myself

in the silt. I decided to be a fish,

brown and speckled,

to camouflage myself in mud and rocks.

Refusing to swim

upstream or downstream, I wondered

about land—how hospitable it might be.

I

Lore

Besides the eyes, I’ve always denied

any similarity to my mother.

But I too worry about birds, a lone egret

standing at lake's edge,

one leg buckled backwards.

For flight, its wings beat

only two times per second.

I saw one preening its white feathers

the day my mother died.

If I could, I’d ask her

why have a fifth child

when you were out of love

and had options.

I knew I was a mistake.

In nature, birds do what is necessary—

most nurture the young,

but some won’t feed the weak.

Others push eggs from the nest.

Shore Birds

Motherless, Eve watched the shore birds,

flocks of Red Knots in flight

darkening the sky. She noticed

their rust-colored bellies

when they alighted and how

they strutted up and down

the Cape May beach, feeding

on the small green and gray pearls

of horseshoe crab eggs,

not much larger than the grains of sand

they were plunked into.

But Eve didn’t know the birds

would eat until they doubled in weight,

then take off again or that nesting

mothers would leave their young

before the chicks could fly.

She didn’t realize the low