Museum of Things by Liz Chang

Come, enter Liz Chang’s memorable museum of meaning-filled, metaphor-lined objects, objects that often reveal, with empathy and irony, much about the sender and the not-so-hidden messages the sender intends: “…my grandparents, who sent/Schulz crib sheets from Hawaii/paying whatever astronomical price to ship/…as a declaration of their wishes for me,/that I might always be/uncomplicated, docile, faithful.” View the Walrus Soap wedding gift to her parents that makes Chang imagine her mother’s “unmoored feeling of a lone white face floating/in the sea of Asian tradition. The fall through/the looking-glass and out the other side of the world.” Taste the story inside the unsippy cup— how the speaker would “shade her [daughter] one more moment/so that she may drink her fill.” Imagine the daughters adding wings to the Chang family Museum of Things.

–Doris Ferleger, author of As the Moon Has Breath

Under close examination, can the material objects of our lives—the things we observe, which also observe us, clarify our own Alice in Wonderland life experiences? Cataloged, complete with component pieces, lineage of different family collections, and their specific measurements, Liz Chang offers us a tour through her Museum of Things, which speaks of how we attempt, with things, to be “anchored to this world.” Through the keepsakes, the collectors’ items, the refurbished rubbish, and “the shards, fallen / like so many eggshells” we attempt to organize our existence. These poems animate the objects, as Chang gives each object agency—as marker of life’s moment, as measure of memory, “but it is the story I am after” as the speaker says, and we come to feel our longing to make sense of life’s chaotic details, of our parents whose stories we enter at intermission, and of generations past who occupy even less shelf space. In these poems we are asked to examine what is passed down, what is picked up, and why— “picking through the well-offs’ cast-offs, their casual / disregard, rather than face our own crumbling.” Through objects, Chang holds up class, racism, sexism, xenophobia, alongside issues of infertility, loss, heartache, and so weaves a room where we must also look at the future—and hope that we can say aloud, “we share these things, a history /…you are mine.” Chang speaks to our fragility, our momentary existence which we pretend away by making objects and children to outlast us—our attempts to pass down ourselves in a carefully curated Museum of Things. These are poems that will shift how you look around your domestic spaces and how you see yourself in the world.

–Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat

In her museum, Liz Chang shows that even the mundane things of everyday life contain stories, and when Chang brings all those stories together, they pose questions, stir memories, upend beliefs, and finally, contribute to an ongoing story which is a life. Chang’s language is rich, metaphorical, lyrical, and brings us closer to understanding the complexity of the human condition.

–Grant Clauser, author of Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven

Review:  https://philadelphiastories.org/article/review-museum-of-things-by-liz-chang/