So Long This Wound Stayed Open

Chang’s first poem ends, “So long this wound stayed open/ I mistook it for a door.” This collection teaches not just how to recognize the wound, but also how to dress it, how to hold its tender flesh and apply the pressure that gives a good hurt, a hurt that helps us heal. This is a nexus of palm-sized worlds – a small girl’s lonely, a mother’s will, the messy dance of language – worlds to carry & contend with all at once. This is a book of endings that open us up. A book of doors to wander through and linger.

DeeSoul Carson

Chang’s poems are of the heart and of the mind, of the eye and of the ear, of the self and of the other. In this exquisite debut, she reminds us of what it means to experience life in its most complicated, most real—which is to say most beautiful—moments. These poems bridge the greatest distances; they ask us, “How far do you have to go before coming back / becomes an act of love?” This book is a gift—an unforgettable act of love.

  Michael Shewmaker, author of Penumbra

Juliana Chang’s lucid, searching debut, So Long This Wound Stayed Open, begins like this: “One tender year, I learn my name/and every way I am terribly wrong.” What follows is a thrilling inquiry into shame and belonging, with all the despair and triumph of a bildungsroman: leave-takings and arrivals, loves yearned for and lost and discovered afresh, the nascent self becoming, clarifying, looking always to the past – the inherited and the lived – to make sense of the bewildering now. Am I who I hoped? Can I learn to love the wilderness that is another person? That is myself? Chang has an eye for telling detail, a slippery image in the closing moments of a poem that delights and unsettles. And in the end, we realize we’ve been arcing all this time toward gratitude, relief: “We link arms and walk the boardwalk./We surprise ourselves with how much we live.” A remarkable first book.

Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer

This book will break your heart, but not without tending to the wound. In So Long This Wound Stayed Open, Juliana Chang explores the pleasures and violences of inherited language as inherited loss. Birthday cards and song lyrics become maps to a distant home. Language frequently fails the speaker: in her birth name, in the gap between her front teeth, in misspellings and misheard words. But what is lost is never truly gone. In these poems, at turns heart-breaking and hilarious, language becomes a way to love beyond loss. Through deep care for words and their origins, for family, and for friendship, Juliana Chang sows the sounds of a new kind of belonging, one that stitches together a home from red bean pancakes and dandelion crowns. This book asks, “How far do you have to go before coming back / becomes an act of love?” And, page by page, this book answers.

Stephanie Niu, author of Survived By