![]() ![]() ![]() Reading My Baby First Birthday feels like immersing oneself into the muck we are all born with and born into, that gory goo of flesh and blood that covers us as we are unknowingly delivered into a world designed to make some bodies suffer for the benefit of others. If that idea were to have a body, it would be newly born. I repeated the same ideas in every poem.” Unable to imagine touching anything that did not already have a name, a defined form. ![]() Unable to hear anything except what was audible. In her chapbook-length essay Hags, she writes that, as a poet, she was “unable to look past what was right there. Zhang has called herself a materialist and “occasional” sensualist. “I am not interested,” Zhang said in an interview, “in writing that’s just a bunch of ideas floating independent of the human bodies who came up with them.” Not only are bodies present in the poems, but the poems themselves seem to have corporeality-glob-like and many-limbed. Zhang’s own mother has called her poems “touchable,” and in My Baby First Birthday, you can see why. They seem to chew, swallow, digest, and shit out the irredeemable injustice and beauty of being born to a world we did not choose and to a family we never deserved. ![]() The 97 poems in My Baby First Birthday, Zhang’s latest collection, masticate this gooey love. ![]()
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