Like all good things, Synthetic Jungle plays with what is hot and what is gross, and only really hot people know that bearing the grotesque, the vulnerable, is the hottest flex of all. In their own form, which is categorically just great style—not genre bending or a caricature of any other writer—Michael Chang evokes landscape through invitation to their world, their native tongue without translation, and their deepest secrets. They admit painful yearning with a sharp, knowing laugh—it’s self aware in a way that is full of the magic of protection. The poems of Synthetic Jungle are quick—they’re discussing the politics of erasure, the conversation of accessibility, and leaving you to ponder the syntax, the feelings versus the image of “face down ass up.” These poems ask for careful attention (whether negative or positive Chang does not care) with their ability to strike you dumb. In the poem ANTISOCIAL SOCIAL CLUB, they give you their rules—they prefer payment to offering. While these poems offer transactional understanding, they also offer their raw hems in a way that is curt and romantic. I am charmed, as a reader and as a poet, by Chang’s ability to flirt.

Many of these poems mimic the cadence of a list, while actually culminating to this divine, Venuisan prayer of appetite. This collection tongues the drain of wanting, They, as Chang so beautifully puts it, circle the rim of desire. While there is much to say about food, what’s on the television and how it’s killing us, gorgeous luxury items, fine fragrances, it’s all about that deep, curtling wanting at the core of every human experience. I am burdened by how Chang makes me want for loneliness and I am basking in how romantic and miserable it is to miss “the scent of someone who wronged you.”

Michael Chang does what many poets are too cowardly to do—they write poems about writing poems, about poems and their conception and birth. About poetry and what it means, and who’s allowed to call what a poem and why. In ST MARKS CONFESSIONAL, Chang dares to make the point I’ve been dying to hear made since I started to write poetry. “The notion of “poetic language” is bogus & elitist—everything is poetry / It looks like one of those creatures that’s cute but could kill u”

Reading these poems in public feels vulnerable in a bodily way, like when you open your mouth to speak and gleek. I feel shy by what I relate to, by what I’ve wanted to write down while reading it. These poems are echoes against the walls, bouncing back loneliness, horniness, and deep, dirty wanting that are so determined that as a reader, I feel like I’m in on a secret, reading a diary, but are so universal that I feel seen, almost embarrassed like a puberty ridden teenager. I would be remiss to not mention its perfect epilogue, lyrics by the British Indie Rock band Blur, which is the first call to petty, lonely travelers like you and me: “I think too much on things I want too much/ It makes me hateful & I say stupid things.”

Synthetic Jungle is not a collection to bring in your tote bag just anywhere, it is a body of work that you should pray at, eat meals with, ponder on your duvet. If I still drank, I’d want an amaretto sour and a cigarette as I finished it—I’d crush the butt of my cigarette into an ashtray a little too forcefully, crunch stone fruit ice between my teeth, and say “jealousy IS an engine” out loud to a bar of strangers. I don’t drink anymore, so instead, I say this aloud to myself around the apartment. I am in awe of this collection of work and what it has allowed in me.