So Long This Wound Stayed Open by Juliana Chang

So Long This Wound Stayed Open is a map toward forgiving and healing your inner child that will break your heart. In her poetry collection, Chang names core wounds like fear of rejection, loss of heritage and home, and welcomes them into her arms, saying: we need not let our scars turn us into islands. Let them instead be the light others use to find us in the dark. This book will open you up and teach you how to recognize wounds and dress them with a new kind of belonging, a place where self becoming is relief.

Juliana Chang’s lucid, searching debut, So Long This Wound Stayed Open, begins like this: “One tender year, I learn my name/and every way I am terribly wrong.” What follows is a thrilling inquiry into shame and belonging, with all the despair and triumph of a bildungsroman: leave-takings and arrivals, loves yearned for and lost and discovered afresh, the nascent self becoming, clarifying, looking always to the past – the inherited and the lived – to make sense of the bewildering now. Am I who I hoped? Can I learn to love the wilderness that is another person? That is myself? Chang has an eye for telling detail, a slippery image in the closing moments of a poem that delights and unsettles. And in the end, we realize we’ve been arcing all this time toward gratitude, relief: “We link arms and walk the boardwalk./We surprise ourselves with how much we live.” A remarkable first book. ―Edgar Kunz