Book Review

As I read Synthetic Jungle, the third full-length collection Michael Chang has published since 2021, I couldn’t help but contemplate the cattiest, most cutting thing that could be said about it. One of the pleasures of Synthetic Jungle is the gossipy, skeptical eye Chang trains on everything they observe, so a wry send-up seems like a natural response. “[I] love to be disappointed by alex dimitrov,” goes one line. “the chinese character for ‘poetry’ is the death of a party,” goes another, referencing both a certain prestige poetry press and a Blur lyric. Nothing is precious in Chang’s work, poetry included, and that is what gives it power and charm. Synthetic Jungle is an irreverent, funny, dynamic, obscene, of-the-moment book that is also deliberately alienating, mysterious, and elusive. It’s full of internet codes and tropes, libidinal slapstick, and contemporary poetry, like Twitter’s @dril if he had a defter touch, or Baudelaire if he had Grindr instead of Paris. It is clearly the product of a crafted persona, but its delivery is resolutely slapdash. It does not perform “the poetic.” Instead, it slaps.

Synthetic Jungle’s “house style” consists of short, fragmentary lines. Like a social media feed, they might be aphoristic and glib or personal and inscrutable. Individual lines feel as though they were summoned more by the prevailing vibe than a poet in the throes of dictation from the muse. By no means do I mean this as a criticism. Chang handles and arranges their material precisely, with all due attention to effect. In “SAINT MARK’S CONFESSIONAL,” they write, “The notion of ‘poetic language’ is bogus & elitist—everything is poetry.” A few lines later, almost testing that claim, we read:

Look away!

Watch the gap!

Run for office?

Can I even run my own life?

Funny! The glibness here is characteristic, and it’s consistently effective. Add some playful nihilism and a rhyme scheme, and it turns memorably hilarious, as in “SINGLES’ NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM”:

screw me sideways to lana del rey

blow my back out

make me really feel it like JFK

when u asked if i could handle it

i thought u meant being a rockstar poet

but of coz u meant ur dick

Throughout this collection, references and discourses play off each other, focused through a synthesizing sensibility which is by turns playful, desirous, irritated, grandiose, glib, beseeching, and urbane. In the aggregate, the poems feel like a nearly improvised performance for the benefit of an audience that is presumably distracted by three other feeds.

Synthetic Jungle is not all quips and one-liners. The more fragmentary poems sit alongside longer pieces that are more meditative and narrative-driven. These longer pieces add dimension to the collection, but they operate under a similar logic. Take “BEST BUDDIES, 1990.” It begins whimsically: “Every day I walk past the mattress store & spot the guy who sold me my mattress. He looks at me like he knows how I sleep, like he has watched me snooze.” It meanders through scenes from an ambiguously romantic relationship in a vulnerable and nostalgic register before turning to a meditation on poetry. “Some poems are abt the words…” it goes, elaborating that there are poems that emphasize “how the sounds come together,” the “totality-of-the-circumstances,” and “play of language.” In contrast to those, Chang suggests, there are poems that are more concerned with “the images evoked.” Finally, a call to poets: “Let’s strive for fewer words & more feeling … / The feeling vs the image: ‘face down ass up.’” Face down ass up! It’s funny, but also arresting—how many of these sweet musings have been a send-up?

So many of Chang’s poems are concerned with where one stands in relation to other people and to culture at large. I would argue that the imagined relation between the self and various others is the central and overarching tension, motor, and theme of Chang’s work. Chang draws on the irreducible mystery of any given relationship (writer/reader included) to conjure a variety of postures. This is true about form as well. These poems are veritable jungles of lines that speak to, over, and against each other. Accordingly, Chang finds devices that both separate and amplify individual lines, cultivating difference and segmentation. Slashes, tildes, brackets, and conventional line breaks abound. And then there are Chinese characters, which stamp these pages, to my Western eye, with a distinct kind of strangeness. Several titles have a Chinese component, like “不适合 NOT SUITABLE” or “白球鞋 WHITE TENNIS SHOES,” and translation software typically reveals direct translations. This doubling suggests these poems arrive already mediated or linguistically resynthesized, among so many other ways. In both form and content, this collection shows us to find difference and to observe what emerges from and within it.

The most fascinating airing of this theme comes in a relatively long piece called “U.F.O. and Dolphin, 1982.” It’s about the shooting of fifteen-year-old Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca by a U.S. Border Patrol agent named Jesus Mesa. Mesa shot Hernández from American soil while Hernández was standing and playing on the Mexican side of a culvert separating Ciudad Juarez from El Paso. The tone here is singularly expository and analytical, and Chang lays out the facts of the case along with technical aspects of its justiciability with the skill of a legal and political professional. Chang illuminates the ways U.S. institutions protected themselves from having to render a judgment on Mesa, effectively sanctioning the murder. The piece closes with a reflection about how the United States makes it exceedingly difficult for ordinary people to seek redress against powerful actors like law enforcement. “As a ppl, we have a reputation for rushing to the courthouse to redress any slight (real or perceived),” Chang writes. “But for such a litigious country, it is actually very difficult to sue certain parties or pursue some kinds of cases.” So much here seems sincere and even touching, including the title, which apparently references the idea that dolphins might help humans to communicate with aliens. Chang inhabits their politics most powerfully in this piece, even taking on an expressly American identity—the better to address the family of Sergio Hernández, in closing, with “Our condolences.”

Chang’s poems are not especially political, but political discourse floats past, intermingling with other fragments of culture and memory. Politics appears in this collection as an occasional irritant the way it does for most of us generally exasperated leftists: “Dems think that ‘if ur pro-life u should be pro-vaccine’ is a sick burn,” and “the weirdest hillary factoid is how she carries hot sauce in her armani purse.” In other words, the political is impersonal here—it’s found material that turns up from time to time, emerging from the distant reaches of media and consciousness, just as any other pop culture artifact or ad jingle or cliché does. So much of Chang’s material is precisely this kind of pop culture arcana, from song lyrics to oddball scientific theories to personal memories, all synthesized and re-presented so that our relationship with it turns new and newly mysterious, and now involving Chang’s synthesizing sensibility. It is wild company.