Prescribee

Reading Prescribee is not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook: it transforms the familiar ingredients of contemporary life into an uncanny, discomfiting concoction. Wielding English as a foreign language and medium, Chang redefines the history of Taiwan and captures the alienation of immigrant experience with a startlingly original voice. Flouting tired expectations of race, gender, nationality, and citizen status, Prescribee is as provocative as it is perceptive, as playful as it is sobering.

The irony, and beauty, of Prescribee is that it does make a sound – it does (re)shape language and its possibilities. The result is a radiant collection that meditates on immigration, family, white supremacy, and the voice of the individual with searing commentary and musicality. […] 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, The Adroit Journal

"Composed as a love song of the immediate, Chang writes of the outsider, one that seeks both entry and distance; writing of memory and history, arriving and departing, and the lonely, lyric architecture of in-betweenness." -rob mclennan