Kristin Chang is a student in NY. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, The Margins and elsewhere. Her chapbook is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2018, and her poetry has been nominated multiple times for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She reads for Winter Tangerine and can be found at kristinchang.com and on Twitter @KXinming.
Kristin Chang’s fierce and devastating couplets in “Poem to cure my mother’s insomnia” capture the unflinching determination of the parentified child who desires to uproot her mother’s suffering. Packed with wild synesthesia and unexpected metaphors — “dice the night fine / as gunpowder,” “take tomorrow on / your tongue like a pill” — Chang’s poem sucks us into its hurricane of images and refuses to let us go until we’ve wept with both mother and speaker, who has gifted us with this “lullaby I’ll slit both / our throats to sing.”
— Eugenia Leigh, Poetry Editor