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 twenty-first 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. You can't help but join in on the heckling, sticking your tongue out in the face of our strange world.
"Michael Chang is back, with their signature irrepressibility: the voice that bubbles with endlessly exuberant wit, encyclopedic pop culture references, playful orthography, and intense emotion. Oh, yes -- these poems are in their feelings! Are you here for poetry that can lure Superman, Dolly Parton, and Prince allusions together? Are you up for parataxis with a vengeance? If wordplay and irreverence are music to your ears, tune into Things a Bright Boy Can Do." Evie Shockley, author of Suddenly We
"Michael Chang's Things a Bright Boy Can Do pushes and pushes, and then pushes some more. It's provocative, fearless, and relentless, unafraid to reinvent tone, grammar, and just about everything else that dares to enter the path of Chang's perception. Things a Bright Boy Can Do is a ride on the back of a new modern language." Victoria Chang, author of The Trees Witness Everything
About the Author :
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.
Review :
"The poems in Michael Chang’s Things a Bright Boy Can Do seem to delight in the absurd potential of randomness." – Angelo Mao, Full Stop
"[T]he poems in Chang’s Things a Bright Boy Can Do are accumulative, whip-smart, hurt and funny, sassy and queer. . ." – Rob McLennan
“Michael Chang’s Things a Bright Boy Can Do continues their irreverent (although “irreverent” seems too quaint a word!) poetic project. Their serious hijinks include critiques of pop culture, politics, and the ugly excesses of the empire. A fourth-generation New York School poet, Chang is both frank—and Frank! O’Hara famously picked up New World Writing while Chang champions Cobra Milk. Chang’s inventive poems take the shape of maps, bingo cards, lie detector tests, and a commencement address. The poems find themselves on LinkedIn, in chatrooms, with text abbreviations. Both comic and provoking, Chang is Fortune Feimster meets Sylvia Plath meets Gus Van Sant. They challenge the very nature of what a poem can do—and then sneak up on you with tender lines like ‘i sing to love singing’ and ‘u loved me most in a poem’. Chang’s is a wild and wonderful original voice.” – Denise Duhamel, author of Blowout
“Michael Chang’s latest, Things a Bright Boy Can Do, is an electric, kaleidoscopic, queer, sexy, hilarious collection, a one-sided chat room transcript, a chaotic house party where you’re as likely to stumble across Rene Magritte as LeBron James, Kitty Dukakis, Foreigner, the Powerpuff Girls. Chang deftly backstrokes through the contradictions and ironies of our degraded age, their course bending always toward the persistence of desire, love. Chang writes ‘high there are u still listening.’ We are. We can’t help it. A wild, astonishing book.” – Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer
“In an electrifying update on the spirit of the New York School, Chang takes us directly to the heart of the culture in these poems. As frantic and shifty as a TikTok stream, Things a Bright Boy Can Do is made of film clips, news items, heartbrokenness, and hilarity. These are the poems O’Hara would have written if he’d had Tinder, and Chang swipes right on nearly everything. The voice is multiple, the forms are too, and the range of references is dizzying. I don’t care how young or old you are, you will feel behind the 8-ball watching these rapid-fire poems insert themselves into high, low, and every other culture at once. Sexual image intentional. And at the bottom of it all is a genuine love. You already have this book in your hands, so just walk up to the counter and buy it. It'll be fun.” – Matthew Rohrer, author of The Others
“As Michael Chang writes in Things a Bright Boy Can Do, they agree: they are a great poet. Good. What a relief to meet a writer so completely unafraid of their own power, unaverse to danger, and ready for anything. This collection is another planet full of life in Chang’s rapidly-expanding universe, as rich in intellect and elegance as in comedic timing. Compare this work to nothing. Underestimate it and perish.” – A. Light Zachary, author of More Sure
Praise for the author:
“More than anything, once again, Chang’s poetry is fun and liberatory, confronting expectations of what the genre “should be” head-on.” – The Rumpus
“The poems in Michael Chang’s latest collection, Almanac of Useless Talents, are punk jazz or noise hip hop—avant-garde and anarchist. Intertextual and reality. Surreal and real. Ugly and pretty. Crystal-clear and obscure. Confident and confessional. Serious and absurd. I speak in binaries, but Chang’s poems are anything but. They deconstruct binaries. Poetry is often the art of containment. Chang’s poems cannot be contained. They bust through barriers and borders, defiantly.” – Kate Carmody, Electric Lit
