Charles Jensen | Writer

Poets & Artists recently published my review of Victoria Chang’s new poetry collection Barbie Chang, which I enjoyed and admired a great deal.

We first meet Barbie Chang, the character whose life and thoughts populate most of Victoria Chang’s fourth collection, at a conference, when everyone stands to give the speaker a standing ovation except Barbie, who walks out of the room. It’s a stark image of a woman who “once worked on a street called Wall,” and it’s this act—quiet defiance that isolates her from those around her, a kind of idealism—that will come to define her again and again in these poems.

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