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This is a book of chain reactions, or, more accurately, matrices. Barbie Chang accounts for so many of life’s variables, even if only alluded to: memory, finance, parenting, parents, aging, romance, professionalism, careers, aspirations, illusions, belonging, isolation, bigotry, sexism, media, literature, fantasies, love, rage, vulnerability, endurance, defiance. Barbie Chang embodies this multiplicity, how these variables impact one another and manifest in her mind and her actions. After all, the book’s title is the name, implying that what lives between these covers is Barbie Chang, not merely The Adventures of Barbie Chang or A Day in the Life of Barbie Chang. There is a wholeness to this collection, and that wholeness comes with the incompletion, the guessing that everyone feels, probably more often than we’d like to admit.

The language and form of these poems arrives cyclically, feels circular, though not redundant. Chang omits conventional punctuation, eliding sentences and fragments, intensifying line and stanza breaks, consistently leading the reader to stumble and stutter, get lost and reread. This is immensely frustrating, and oh so artful. A strong example is this excerpt of “Barbie Chang Can’t Stop Watching,”

to see whose body it will run on some

 thought Ellen Pao was a

cyst in the office made lists in the office

 of all the wrong things

someone made a poll about her did she

 or didn’t she was she or

wasn’t she always the same binary argument

 racism or incompetence is

there a third possibility that when we

 have seen something so

many times we no longer recognize it as

 injustice our heads

As Carl Phillips compounds his syntax, as Emily Dickinson dashes openings into her lines and breaks, as Jean Valentine makes spare yet muscular, lyrical leaps, all slowing the reader, applying pressure for greater examination, Chang removes what we are all taught to expect—punctuation as markers, signs, bumpers, hints. As a result, sentences seem to overlap, often leaving the reader uncertain about where one ends and another begins. And this erasure of punctuation also amplifies the line and stanza breaks, the stanza shapes, the sequence patterns, and the eventual, abrupt white space scattered throughout the final segment of the book.

This collection consists of an inquiry, of many questions and guesses. The speaker wonders about and is always in the middle of life. What I mean to say is that the speaker passes on insight but is never so arrogant to proclaim, is always working out the language and idea with the reader. For instance, in“Barbie Chang’s Daughter,” we witness the speaker wondering about voyeurism, the predatory, about identity and self-recognition:

 ocean would the deer

even name itself a deer if we’ve never

 seen a deer does it mean

it doesn’t exist if Barbie Change perches

 on a hill with binoculars

waiting for deer and sees someone else

 looking for deer but

watching her instead does that mean she

 exists or that she’s a deer

Over and over again, Chang’s poems capture a startling intimacy paired with an uncanny distance. Again, a mesmerizing paradox. With the poem, “Is It Rude For Barbie Chang,” the speaker wonders about love, and Chang’s shaping of language and line truly sharpen that wondering:

arms wide open as in waltzing who

 authored the word love

does anyone know the author’s original

 intent does it matter

that no one knows exactly what it means

 does it matter that it

might signify everything what if we never

 needed a word for it

what if it is shapeless and composed

 of gestures if we name

the thing loveit doesn’t mean it

 will last a nut does its

best to last but at some point just falls

 like all the others before it

Chang’s removal of punctuation and the resulting vertigo, the intensification of breaks, the fumbling, subtly draws attention to the overwhelming white space around the language printed on the page, and around Barbie Chang herself. The majority of these poems, in unrhymed couplets, address family and social life, while a series of sonnets addresses, quite literally, a daughter. To trace an arc of Barbie Chang is to follow a lineage. Always reflective, analytical, the book’s central speaker, an out-of-body Barbie Chang, tells us first about the parents’ past and deterioration, about Barbie Chang’s past and present, her fantasies, her loves, her making. Then the sonnet sequence, “Dear P.,” an enrichening of Barbie Chang’s recent past and present, her parenthood, a cautioning, a deepening, a surrender to all that is actual. Moving further into Barbie Chang’s mind and heart, reflections of social ostracism, professional gatekeeping, patriarchy, parenting, we are delivered to the final sequence of “Dear P.” poems, clearly casting the speaker’s and Barbie Chang’s eyes into a future — here are hopes and tips, and the holding of breath.

~

This is also a book of circles. As they say: circles are endless; they are untwisted infinity and still infinite; they are inclusive, they help everyone see everyone else’s face, eyes; they are nature’s purest geometry; circle of life, etc. Circles seem always to be positive, except in terms of hell, and even then, I suppose, there can be an upside. All of these are embedded in Chang’s poems, with at least a faint nod to her first collection, Circle (Southern Illinois University, 2005). There is also the detriment of a circle, its closedness, its isolation, its endlessness. Is there really that much humans desire to be endless?

The most explicit reference to a circle is “the Circle” formed by “the beautiful thin mothers at school.” This closed loop first appears in “Barbie Chang Parks” as “a perfect circle,” a network of the likeminded, the in-line, the conforming mothers. And according to the speaker, “the Circle will school [Barbie Chang] if she lets / them.” This Circle makes several cameos throughout the book, and perhaps most urgent is Barbie Chang’s relationship to and with the unit of the Circle. As implied above, Barbie Chang must choose to let the Circle school her, or not, or in part. The poems’ speaker seems consistent throughout the book and lets us know that the Circle and its knowledge are both suspect and alluring, as in “Once Barbie Chang Loved:”

the Circle they form each day works

 as a ring around a

planet magnetic and genetic if she sticks

There is a desire to belong, even if that belonging comes at a painful cost. And there are pressures to belong, illustrated in “Barbie Chang Got Her Hair Done,” pressures from within and from without, children, for example,

she still wanted the rainbow to rain on

 her to wear bows in her

hair that meant she belonged somewhere

 else she owed it to

her children to make friends to blend

 into the dead end

This instance emphasizes that one’s children are part separate from and part central to a parent, anticipating many of the “Dear P.” poems. Chang’s poems seem always to bear an immense tension, a paradox, a contradiction too hefty for other modes of communication. Her language, her presentation make this feat appear effortless, make it feel everyday, as indeed these sorts of contradiction are — mothers, women, writers, those who are marginalized and maligned shoulder this paradox daily. With the beginning of “Barbie Chang Wants to Be Someone,” Chang expands the concept of “the Circle:”

Barbie Chang wants to be someone

 special to no longer

have wet hair to no longer be spectral

 to be a spectacle Barbie

Chang wants to befriend the Academy

 which is the Circle

wants to eat meat with the Academy

 wants to share with the

cads who think there is a door to the

 Academy wants the key to

the Academy door wants to give grants

 and awards for words

but she never knew that life was about

 unraveling not raveling

The Circle no longer, if it ever did, only refers to the clique of mothers at school, it is any closed loop, complete with limitations and prejudices that dictate membership. The Academy. Whiteness. Another indictment of the Circle comes when “Barbie Chang’s Mother Calls,”

 what Bisquick is someone

wrote a book of poems about Kanye

 West there are still

old poets looking for the best new young

 poets who are all hornets

around the same old next Barbie Chang

 knows she lives in an

America that most people don’t care

 about on most days

she can’t distinguish between being a

 token and racism she

And there are subtle references to the Circle, to circles, to the occasional breaking of circles. In “Mr. Darcy Leans,” one of several poems focused on the Pride and Prejudice hero, the speaker narrates Barbie Chang’s conflicted connection to the man, to “white space,” ending with:

light trying to separate sometimes

 children hold hands

and spin until one gets so dizzy she

 spins out and away from

the group it’s impossible to outline

 a beating heart

And throughout the book, circular images appear time and again: eyes, irises, binoculars, lungs, hearts, hands holding, arcs, half circles, domes.

~

Barbie Chang suggests an unclasping of circles, an opening. It is not a prescription or a full-scale dismantling, but an option for a better way forward, for us or at least hopefully for our children. The speaker presents this to P. in the final sequence. The final sequence presents this to the reader with its blown open lines and spacing, its recommendations and resignations. Victoria Chang closes this book with love ballooning, as these excerpts rise from the page: