Things That No Longer Delight Me

These poems move with poise and a painterly precision through the realms of history, elegy inheritance and loss. They are a map you can trust--if what you seek is "an eternity," to cross "the narrow portal between seasons" and "be led back out in amazement." I am arrested again and again by the beauty and devotion coursing through these lines. - —Tracy K. Smith What is family history, after all, but the stories we overhear? That is what I thought as I read Leslie C. Chang's Things That No Longer Delight Me with its quiet yet powerful interweaving of past and present, of reclamation and loss, of histories whispered and revealed. Her poetry is, to quote one of her lines, a process of memory and bone. In a field of strong contenders littered with beautifully written poems dedicated to craft, Things That No Longer Delight Me is a book in which craft is put to use for a better purpose; to tell a story which needs to be told. It's a beautifully lyric time machine.---—Cornelius Eady, University of Notre Dame Leslie Chang's several images of trapped light remind me that if you open a kaleidoscope and shake the contents onto your palm, you will discover an assortment of, say, charms and sequins. In this first book, she has collected ordinary things to dazzle the reader--battered planet, aerogramme, jackdaw in azalea, the requisite jade bracelet--then mixes them into the poetry of family history and personal habit. Things That No Longer Delight Me is sure to delight the reader.---—Kimiko Hahn, author of The Narrow Road to the Interior In their mix of tenderness, delicacy of observation, their feel for textures, their refined and refining intelligence, all brought to bear by a robust sensibilty that doesn't flinch in the face of the harder matters of absence, loss, grief, the poems of Leslie Chang compose a complete, remembered, lived-in world . . . Unmarked by rhetorical showiness, Chang's pitch-perfect sketches enter unobtrusively into the lives of her family elders with a profound understanding, the result of contemplation, patience, silence. Taken together, the poems compose an elegiac celebration of family life—bridging two or three generations, two countries, two different worlds, all realized at a distance and in memory, and brought back to life in these brief, brilliant conjurings. 'You knew how to receive a guest,' she says in one poem: 'With a gift.' In Things That No Longer Delight Me, Leslie Chang offers us many such welcoming gifts, all wrapped in what she justly calls 'the language of the here and now.' - —Eamon Grennan Chang explores her heritage, and she reimagines lives with devotion and loyalty. (—Publishers Weekly)