The Boss

With so many poets writing about the academy, it's refreshing to see someone addressing office work—though Chang (Salvinia Molesta) is less concerned with our endeavors than with our fraught relationship with power. Throughout, her lines are unpunctuated, her words compacted and repeated, the music a mad, tumbling rush—signaling exactly the not-so-quiet desperation of office life: "we are high performers former high hopers on a high wire." The boss dominates and belittles—"pretends to glue us after/ she breaks us we try to glue ourselves"—and the pressure to please her is relentless. Meanwhile, she herself is safely protected "in a no-fly zone even when [she]/ misses numbers poor-performs." Chang further highlights the anomie of the office with set pieces referencing Edward Hopper and includes poems about her father's "stroke/ a stroke of bad luck," detailing his loss of language (so in contrast to her own facility) while paralleling the control in home and office: "my father// dictated to me to eat tomatoes my father was dictated to/ by his boss."