Praise for Prescribee

The Beauty of Being: 2022 Best Debut Poets
Poets & Writers

The Best Poetry of 2022
Ms. Magazine

“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 Bonner, Adroit Journal

“It becomes obvious rather quickly that Chang is a virtuoso with metaphor…Prescribee is smart and mellifluous, worthy of multiple reads and of sharing.” DeMisty D. Bellinger, MER

“Chang’s approach to English reminds us that language should not be prescriptive, but interpretative.” Chloe Xiang, Annulet

“Chang’s poetry holds anger with a unique depth and richness…what stays with me most are the lines when Chang carves out a space simultaneously removed from the world and emphatically present, like a shadow and a light combined.” Morgan Võ, Poetry Project

“How Chia-Lun Chang Found Power in Poetry”
Interview by Zachary Pace, The Millions

“Spontaneity Through Ambiguity”
Interview by Anne Lai, Asymptote

A conversation with editor Gia Gonzales, Nightboat Books

In Their Own Words, on “The Government Makes Me,” Poetry Society of America

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…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 growing in a way that no other poet invites…Chang’s poetry treats language as the 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

Events

By What Means and What Measure

A reading and panel discussion

with Daniel Shieh, Lisa Hsiao Chen and Ly Tran

The Arts Center at Governors Island, Saturday, August 12, 3pm

Where Time Runs Backwards by Daniel Shieh
with Arleene Correa Valencia

The Arts Center at Governors Island

May 6-October 1, 2023