Poetry Goes Pop: Michael Chang’s Toy Soldiers
By Rocco Prioletti
Toy Soldiers (Action, Spectacle Press, 2024), is a work deeply intertwined with the always-on, always-spinning and ever-so-unknottable web of pop culture: from the 90s slacker rock of Eric’s Trip, to Paul Klee’s penchant for awful quotes; Timothée Chalamet’s rumored run-in with crabs, to unbathed Brooklynites who “read too much pynchon.” Michael Chang doesn’t avert their poetic gaze from the kitsch; instead they stare deeply into it, seeing bits of the world and a bit of themself in its glare.
Following 2023’s Synthetic Jungle, Chang’s latest book disregards both traditional format and structure, offering a sporadic feed of contemporary themelessness. Continuing in the footsteps of likeminded poets like Frank O’Hara and Melissa Broder, Chang’s insistence on deconstructing the possibilities of lyric poetry gives way to experimentation on all fronts. Personifying our collective online unconsciousness, Chang’s only interest in communication is the informal: the often forgotten, sporadically-written notes app confessionals; the academically ‘lowbrow’ and underappreciated sincerity of texting; the recreational black humorists hiding in comment sections. For instance, in “Hope That’s True”, they imagine Anne Frank growing up during the 2010s bowlcut boom, remembering that a particular pop star once suggested that “Anne Frank would’ve been a belieber.”
In practice, these fragments of online trivia and slanged-out musings—unabashedly and overwhelmingly honest and precisely undercut with satirical comedic incisions— incentivize a new framework for poetic expression: one which demands text language to be in conversation with established literary tradition.
In “Future Pirate Radio,” Chang performs their sprawling stream of consciousness-styled mentality by dialing through a series of radio transmissions: the voiceless, the unheard, the near static. In this way Chang styles the speedy, fragmented, and ephemeral style of a Twitter feed within poetry. Equal parts cultural satire and poignant commentary on sexuality, Chang begins envisioning an America, as David Foster Wallace did, further corrupted by distractions and entertainment. They write: “the police have airpods in / bitch don’t trust them / to burp me.” Chang describes the police with a deceivingly casual and approachable manner, which is undercut by distrust, highlighting their need for constant entertainment and pleasure. At the time, the scene calls to attention police brutality. It satirically subverts reader’s expectations by way of infantilizing, and subsequently condemning, their position of power as being synonymous with childish pleas for self-satisfaction and amusement.
Chang also humorously plays with internet archetypes like the ‘pick me girl,’ with lines like, “she’s not like the other goirls / she built different […] hot chips n lies.” However, underpinning the satirical self-grandeur of DJ Khaled-style proclamations like “we slay we slain / we man we g.o.a.t.,” Chang earnestly explores sexual identity as well. Through descriptions that combine sexual fluidity, racial difference, and societal persecution, referenced specifically through the Stonewall riots, Chang writes that “our love is comprehensive / both sides of the track.” It’s moments like these that emphasize Toy Solder’s sheer tonal complexity. It’s effortlessly able to tackle various subjects, and while Chang’s bluntness and fevered affinity for the seemingly unpoetic may come across as daunting, it’s possible that this kind of shift is a necessity.
In a culture defined by a loose scripture of headlines, soundbites, and one-liners, how else could we champion meaning-as-artistic-resistance than by writing within that language, highlighting underrepresented speech at the same time? Though the poems risk becoming dated, they might say what we need to hear now. After all, as Chang relays in “Saving the World,” “my poetry is aimed at destroying ugly shit.”
Rocco Prioletti is a NOR intern studying English and journalism at Ohio University.
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