Victoria Chang, The Boss

THE BOSS IS NOT POETIC

The boss is not poetic writing about the boss is not poetic

            a corporate pencil doesn’t gallop

    dactyls one foot two feet six feet seven the boss

                only has two feet the rain taps its

trimeters all over my roof the boss can only jump up and

            down in one spot the boss cannot do the

    splits the rain splits into pieces the rain slants into

                my face into my eyes that are not really

slanted the boss only rhymes with cross and loss

            poem rhymes with palindrome and loam a desk is

    not poetic either it has four sides hard and stiff a

                Herman Miller chair loses question marks

through its holes as it holds a Herman or a Miller one day

            I watch a shrill pelican dive straight down into

    the water a waiter brings us fish on a plate a pelican

                swallows a fish whole a pelican is the boss

with its endless office of sky I could stand on the pier

            the whole day and peer at the pelicans that fall

    from the sky with their briefcases of fish in their

                oily grey suits and shined black shoes

I’m quite taken with the poems in California poet Victoria Chang’s third trade poetry collection, The Boss (San Francisco CA: McSweeney’s, 2013), the first of her work I’ve read. Her poems move like a rush of water, hardly a break or a pause, and must be fantastic to hear read aloud for the lyric flow. Chang’s cadence balances one of near-assault against a soft flow, playing with repetition and intoxicating rhythm, and seems to favour the staggered four-line stanza, in poems ranging in size from three to eight stanzas long. In a book of less than fifty pages, who exactly, one might ask, is the boss? Throughout the collection, the perspective of the poems shift, ranging from the obvious suggestion of the boss as an employer, to a new infant and the narrator’s own father, and even the father of the boss as the boss himself. Writing around subservience, notions of personal, professional, sexual and gendered power, and who truly might be in charge, Chang’s poems are nearly liquid, and include a number of pieces for and from the works of Edward Hopper, slipping his images between that of “the boss.” As she writes to open the poem “EDWARD HOPPER’S OFFICE AT NIGHT,” “Maybe the woman in the blue dress is the boss [.]”

THE BOSS IS BACK

The boss is back from the hospital is hospitable then

            hostile the boss gave birth the boss

    lay still on a bed to rest to bedrest to rest

                the baby girl on the bed

each morning I lay my cast to rest but there’s no jury no

            fury I lay my baby on the bed I sponge

    her I wonder whether the boss feels what I feel

                for my baby a heel on a cheek

doesn’t always mean love the boss kicks up her heels

            her eyes empty and eerie like a fish’s eyes

    we are weary we are wary of the boss we

                sleep standing up but so

does the boss miles and miles under the sea even the fish

            don’t sleep they can hear the helicopters

    carrying soldiers going back and forth

                and back and forth