Copper Canyon Press, 2017

In her fourth collection, Victoria Chang is at her best, performing sharp language-play and breathless turns in poems that ring vivid, humorous, and true. Barbie Chang is an energetic social commentary whose eponymous heroine is a perpetual outsider, failing at the impossible task of fitting in with “the beautiful thin mothers at school” who “form a perfect circle.” We follow Barbie Chang on romantic misadventures with Mr. Darcy and through the humbling heartbreak of caring for ailing parents. Two sonnet sequences interrupt Barbie Chang’s narrative with first-person lyricism and urgency, revealing the great emotional undercurrents that animate these pages: love and desire.