An arch, precise collection of poems that casts world-historical hierarchies in an aspic mold and serves them back to us on a warped platter.

Reading Prescribee is not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook: it transforms the familiar ingredients of contemporary life into an uncanny, discomfiting concoction. Wielding English as a foreign language and medium, Chang redefines the history of Taiwan and captures the alienation of immigrant experience with a startlingly original voice. Flouting tired expectations of race, gender, nationality, and citizen status, Prescribee is as provocative as it is perceptive, as playful as it is sobering.

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About the Author
Chia-Lun Chang is the author of Prescribee (2022), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and One Day We Become Whites (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2016). She has received fellowships and support from Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Tofte Lake Center, Vermont Studio Center and Poets House. Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in New York City.

Reviews

"The irony, and beauty, of Prescribee is that it does make a sound - it does (re)shape language and its possibilities. The result is a radiant collection that meditates on immigration, family, white supremacy, and the voice of the individual with searing commentary and musicality. [...] Prescribee embodies that calcification of voice. Chang's lyricism, voice, and narrative will stun any reader poem after poem, bright and hard as bone."-Hannah Bommer, The Adroit Journal

"Chia-Lun Chang's Prescribee explores the myriad impacts of language when it is used as a tool of control and oppression. . . Her poems revel in sarcasm and confrontation, deploying tongue-in-cheek at maximum volume to call out hypocrisy, suppression, and cruelty with language and imagery that rises to a corresponding level of the comically absurd."-Morgan Vo, The Poetry Project Newsletter

"Composed as a love song of the immediate, Chang writes of the outsider, one that seeks both entry and distance; writing of memory and history, arriving and departing, and the lonely, lyric architecture of in-betweenness."-rob mclennan

"Prescribee is smart and mellifluous, worthy of multiple reads and of sharing. And Chia-Lun Chang is a poet to keep an eye out for."-DeMisty D. Bellinger, MER

"Prescribee is full of surprises. The next page, the next line, even the next word turning away, or inward, or sharply upward in jagged spikes of feeling, controlled bursts of detail. Chia-Lun Chang's voice is clear and bright and highly engaging-yet somehow elusive, keeping the reader on the move, asking questions and in the process, lighting up pleasure centers of the mind and the heart."-Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

"Chia-Lun Chang's Prescribee is something altogether alchemical: how else to describe how Chang's vision strips familiar narratives of their crude, suffocating crust, how her language foments fresh, subversive ways of thinking and feeling? These poems smuggle strange, urgent things across borders: "my throat has not applied for a passport / it is too thick to pass through your years." There is music in them that ears have never alighted on before, an exophonic tongue that remindings us that language left deviant and wild is where the most potent forms of resistance and intervention begins. Prescribee is an irreducible debut, an electrifying phantasmagoria."-Jenny Xie, author of Eye Level

"Reading Chia-Lun Chang's cutthroat, tendrilled debut, I find my sense of language as a material and a structure shifting and growing in a way that no other poet invites. The properties of English, poured through the machines of Chang's poems, can shift from a cruel and violent tool of empire, gender, and capital to a beautiful and strange meeting place: 'Today you arrive in the gardenia. Your vehicle, a pinwheel.' I experience Chang's poetry as a potent tonic that treats language as the imperfect, (de)generative, and living substance through which we navigate both lived and imagined experience in the face of fractured belonging. These poems are terrifying, real, dreamlike, and uncompromisingly original."-Emily Skillings, author of Fort Not

"What does it mean to be a poet who writes in one's second language? In her debut collection, Prescribee, poet Chia-Lun Chang crafts unsettling, intricate poems which articulate her deep ambivalence about the American Dream. She describes herself as being "prescribed" to, showing both the betrayal and powerlessness she feels as she leaves behind her home of Taiwan and falls for the alluring, deceptive possibility of inhabiting a Western vernacular."-Chloe Xiang, Annulet

"Oh how I love (lived) Chia-Lun Chang's Prescribee! Not since my encounters with Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, John Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath, and Kamau Brathwaite's Eleguas have I experienced the power of the (my) multilingual brain thinking out loud, unapologetic, across the pages of a book of poetry in English. This debut endtroduces to American poetry a disorientalist speaker whose accents float against nostalgia and longing for family members; foundering relationships and disrespectful advice; French military fantasy and obscure history; filariasis and naive American boys; creepy male American photographers; and the cold, cold heart of a green-card-denying government. Prescribee desires and laments a (Jan)US America whose 'boundaries assimilate'/ 'border crosses beef soup' yet also condemns whoever comes here for love (and chooses to remain after) to a struggle 'with stacks of papers' 'suppressed/shuddered' by 'shredders/shelters.' Defiant '{l}ike a song/that has not been hurt,' Chang 'lay{s} down' linguistically intricate lyric poetry and prose whose slippages summon the fruit mutations and matadoras of Frances Chung, Hsia Yu, and Sarah Gambito, while thrumming with the registers of the probing traveler of Chen Zhifan's My America Journal. 'Invisionable until//the empire murders itself,' Prescribee stands out for its darkly comic dreaming through the U.S. America, conjured in an 'Engli-shhh' whose honey still burns my throat."-Paolo Javier, author of O.B.B.

Book Information
ISBN 9781643621517
Author Chia-Lun Chang
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint Nightboat Books
Publisher Nightboat Books