Poet Laureate 2012
LIZ CHANG
Liz Chang was selected as the 2012 Montgomery County Poet Laureate by Kathleen Sheeder Bonnano. Chang recently published her second book of original poems and literary translations with Book&Arts Press, What Ordinary Objects. Her poems have recently appeared in Philadelphia Stories, Breakwater Review and Apiary. Her translations of the French Surrealist poet Claude de Burine were also published in The Adirondack Review. Chang received her MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Delaware County Community College. Liz lives with her husband and their two cats outside of Philadelphia.
“Liz Chang’s compelling poems explore themes like the frailty and temporality of the human body, the inevitability of death, and the responsibility of family as witness. They contain surprising metaphorical shifts and lurches as in “Water Main,” where the foreman emerging from the pit becomes the surgeon emerging from the table with the speaker’s mother’s blood on his septum.” Some of the poems express both the beauty and the entrapment of sexual desire and the need for intimacy. And throughout, Chang gifts us with her imagery — beautiful , fluid images of suspension, floating, water and the sea — the speaker who grows gills and “drowns kissing air,” or contemplates the “lavender wash of the empty fields,” or who takes a photo of you, with “your grown up watch/ resting against the tank of ethereal jellyfish. Chang’s poetry is riveting and ambitious – I’m honored to introduce her as the 2012 Montgomery County Poet Laureate.”