Half-Lit Houses

Tina Chang

In my review of Brigit Kelly's The Orchard, I talked about lighter reading, and I didn't necessarily mean that in a bad way; some poetry is brilliant, but light reading (and no, cod help us, I'm not talking about light verse); Li-Young Lee's stuff comes to mind. It's got all sorts of depth to it, but you can read it for the surface and still get something out of it. Those who wish to pursue deeper meanings may do so. Everyone's happy. The vast majority of poetry falls into either this category or that of Kelly, where you're basically forced into deeper meanings.

Tina Chang seems to fall somewhere in the middle, which is exceptionally rare. There are pieces here that force the reader into needing to look deeper, but they are few. There are pieces that can be read for surface beauty alone and have the option to go deeper, but they, too, are few. The rest of the pieces here sit in a place in between those two things, and it's a place I'm not quite sure I know how to describe. Wherever it is, it's delicate and beautiful, and Tina Chang deserves a far, far wider audience than she presently has.

This is poetry of family, stretching back from before Chang's birth (at least, if the one passing reference she makes to the age of a narrator is to be taken as her own) to the present day, presenting the stories one hears about families with a rich history, doing so in a lush, precise language. There's not a single poem in this collection that misses the mark. It's easily one of the two or three best collections I've come across this year, and is well worth your time.