HEROES by MICHAEL CHANG
PREORDER
If poetry and standup comedy had a baby, it would be this book. Sharp-witted and side-splittingly hilarious, Heroes rescues poetry from taking itself too seriously. Each poem sparkles as an insightful wink and nod to counterculture and inevitable sea change—served with devilish disharmony.
--Yona Harvey
Is an immigrant an animal, a fish, or a whitening strip? What this question does is what these poems do. Imagine a lotus flower wobbling on its stem in the lobby of a Hyatt Regency in 2016, about to check in. Michael Chang will put you off ‘green-gold’ forever. Don’t even try.
--Bhanu Kapil
Michael Chang’s Heroes is everything I look for in a poetry collection. It’s wild, funny, and a little bit dangerous as in ‘where is the gun emoji ???’ In this world of Cheeto dust and ‘unmedicated dick,’ a pelican with a beak full of poems delivers psychedelic images—'Van Gogh’s ear wrapped in bacon’—and fantastically memorable lines. Chang made me laugh and cry, using language to dismantle the ‘sweet myths’ of the 21st century, exposing its miserable core with both tenderness and brilliance.
--Sandra Simonds