Things a Bright Boy Can Do

(Paperback)

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In Michael Chang's latest, all the world's a vaudeville stage, and this poet is its jester with a knife.

Like an elongated diss track, Chang's poems go from flirty to righteous, wrathful to lackadaisical, all in the span of one page. The titans of pop culture and poetry wrestle at Chang's whimsy, their poems a series of flings and retorts at the end of a late-night spree.

Like a compendium of American poetics, this collection breezily changes style and mood as easily as a prom queen smiles beneath the crown. With nods to O'Hara and Ashbery, the poems in Things a Bright Boy Can Do flit from the sewage of Americana to the heights of ecstatic experience. Each poem is a playground meant to delight readers before they skip along.

With each successive book, Michael Chang showcases a poet at home in the 21st century; nothing is too silly or too morbid for the page. When reading Chang's poetry, the madness of interpreting the social media age suddenly makes sense. With Things a Bright Boy Can Do, you can't help but join in on the heckling, sticking your tongue out in the face of our strange world.

Author Bio

Michael Chang (they/them) is the author of Synthetic Jungle (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Toy Soldiers (Action, Spectacle, 2024), and Things a Bright Boy Can Do (Coach House Books, 2025). They edit poetry at Fence.