The Boss

by Victoria Chang

Written in “a breathless kind of fury,” the poems in award-winning poet Victoria Chang’s virtuosic third collection The Boss dance across the page with the brutal power and incandescent beauty of spring lightning. Obsessive, brilliant, linguistically playful—the mesmerizing world of The Boss is as personal as it is distinctly post-9/11. The result is a breathtaking, one-of-a-kind exploration of contemporary American culture, power structures, family life, and ethnic and personal identity.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Hardcover

First published August 6, 2013

About the author

Victoria Chang's latest book of poems is With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Corsair in the UK), which received the Forward Prize in Poetry for the Best Collection. Her most recent book is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her prose book, Dear Memory, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. Her recent book of poems, OBIT, was published in 2020 by Copper Canyon Press. It was named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a TIME, NPR, Publisher's Weekly, Book of the Year. It received the LA Times Book Prize, the PEN Voelcker Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the NBCC, and long listed for the NBA. She is the Bourne Chair of Poetry and the Director of Poetry@Tech at Georgia Tech.

Her website is www.victoriachangpoet.com. Twitter: @VChangPoet.

Reviews

[Emma Sea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked each individual poem. I love Chang's rhythms, and particularly how she works with assonance. What I didn't like so much was the poems as a collection. By about page 17 I was looking for variety in her line breaks and structure, and by page 35 I was aching for it. Now I assume that the overall effect of this is to echo the idea of the rhythm of our days, yeah, given that 'boss' is the theme of the book? And I did like the structure, but a little bit of variety makes everything sweeter, right? In poetry, and in employment too.

2.5 stars, rounded up, for my enjoyment of the physical object that is this book.

[Kali · Rating 5 out of 5]

from kalireads.com:

Although I don’t read a bunch of poetry these days, sometimes I stumble upon something that stops me in my tracks and speaks to me as the truth for our times in a way only a poem could. This happened to me with a poem from Victoria Chang, “The Boss Tells Me,” featured in The Believer‘s June 2013 issue: “I can align/myself with the bystanders who have different/standards for another year I can mortgage my heart/in monthly installments for another year I can fill/my garage with scooters and things/with motors like Mona at the end of the hall with/her loan and home and college bills who never/sees anything in the office never seems to hear/anything in the office but her own/heartbeat her own term sheet for another year”

Like this poem, all the rest included in The Boss are so relevant to today’s struggles and so jarring in the most beautiful and breathtaking of ways. Like much of the best poetry out there, Chang isn’t afraid to go to the dark side–she writes of the ennui and injustice (like the chicken and the egg) of American corporate culture (“no keyboard competes with the tap-tap/of his heart”), the struggle in explaining the lost American dream to her children (“we plug away despite plagues in other countries/we are still in awe of the boss and/the law and all the dollars the doll I once had is now my/daughter’s doll she will dream of balls and/gowns and sparkly towns when should I tell her all the/towns are falling down”), and watching her father forget the American and its politics entirely as he ages (“he can’t/remember his passwords can’t get past/his words can’t figure out what the pass is for can’t/access his accounts can’t remember/ass-kissing for his large accounts can’t account/for himself can no longer count”). The words, stanzas, and themes in The Boss all fall apart into a sort of stuttering and skipping word-play of delirium that reaches a powerful crescendo by the end of the book.

The Boss was published by McSweeney’s Poetry Series. McSweeney’s never ceases to amaze me with the quality of work they publish, since publishing my favorite book of all time The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian. In order to get a copy of The Boss, I signed up for a subscription to the McSweeney’s Poetry Series and got a better deal than I would have even on Amazon–when does that happen? Subscribe for 4 issues of the poetry series, starting with The Boss or the next book, for $40. Chang was recently reading at Moe’s Books in Berkeley and I regrettably missed it, as I wasn’t feeling well. Such is life.

Reading poetry always feels more meditative to me than reading a novel, as I’m not seeking a conclusion or larger plot twist yet to come. I wonder if this is why not many people read poetry, or why I tend to not seek it out as much myself. While reading a book can feel, in a way, like almost accomplishing something, poems ask that I try to not accomplish anything while reading them–they offer nothing, and ask that I simply be open to absorbing their words. This seems rather counterintuitive in American society today, where the demands are always to do more, better, faster. I think this is why poetry was also the perfect medium for Chang to express her points–our time spent getting stuff done in office jobs and our many struggles to get ahead may make this book of poems all the more difficult to get through, but all the more meaningful if we manage to pick it up and appreciate it.

[Alex Jiménez · Rating 3 out of 5]

hm. it was okay. a little too fragmented for my tastes. but i like these lines:

“does a tree / mind that it can never move”

and

“I am afraid of the blue ghosts the green /
and orange ghosts”

[Maximilian Gerboc · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m really new to poetry, so maybe don’t take too much stock in anything I have to say about this? But - I loved it. The language and words were playful but also pretty devastating. Victoria Chang is able to pick apart and satirize modern capitalism - the corporate culture which infantilizes its employees, the monotony, and the “everyone is replaceable” attitude - with a clarity which I think can only occur in poetry. In a world, created by the author, which meditates on its subjects and invites the reader to share in the experience of that world. I particularly loved the poems contemplating the Edward Hopper office paintings. Please, if you read this series of poems, look at the painting Chang is describing. It’s meant to be a visual experience as well as a literary one.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

I Drive Up Hills
by Victoria Chang

I drive up hills to see the tops of other people's heads
at the top I can't read books at the top
I can't watch my own children at the top I am
dumb I am numb at the top

but still I want to go to the top because that's where
a boss sits a boss has fits at the top gives
tips at the top a boss gets into tip-top shape
on the way up yesterday I met a boss

who asked his people how they felt once I
met a boss who knelt as he bused
tables who helped his people without his arms
on his hips my father wanted me

to be a boss who can fire up people
who can fire people my father used to
circle English words he didn't know with a
red pen now his books drip red now

his books have locks he has an aphasia workbook
he asks my four-year-old to help when I
ask him the name of his old boss
he says his own name

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though many of the poems have been published separately, they come together in this collection to express the repetition of a balanced life. Shockingly, working an office job and taking care of the elderly can become repetitive. For me, some of the poems slip into the background, providing a sort a white noise punctuated by stronger poems like "I Drive up Hills," and "The Boss has a Father," to mention a few. The collection had a distinct rhythm, usually breakneck, and some of the poems demand to be read aloud. When taken as a complete collection, Chang paradoxically offers a chorus on monotony.

[Van Phan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victoria's poems are absolutely breathless... and if you tried to stop, the poem itself would lose its place and the sound would not sound the same anymore. Reading her poems to myself was difficult but when I heard her read it in one of my undergrad creative writing courses, it was moving. The Boss is more than just a person or representation of power, it's something/ someone that move you in a way that cannot be express in just a sentence or two; it's an on- going, overwhelming feeling.

[Annette Boehm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. This poetry collection, Chang's third by the way, is just fun to read.

This book would be good for getting someone interested in poetry who’s put literature off as stuffy and dusty. It also looks great on your shelf with its rich orange spine. Read my full review, with excerpts from the poems, on my blog: http://outsideofacat.wordpress.com/20...

[Martin Ott · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a writer who has spent decades in the kookie cauldron of corporate America, The Boss hit home for me with a grand mix of artistry and workplace observations. A must read.

[boocia]

i really really enjoyed this read; the pieces are literally breathtaking in that the lines just flow punctuationless, but also the wordplay of rhyming and alliteration and refusing to caesura just means you never catch a breath really

it definitely creates this like, difficult reading experience; i want to be completely overrun by each poem stylistically, esp cause the poems are about being overwhelmed, but these poems feel so pick-apart-able; a lot of dense imagery where i feel the urge to re-read, to dissect how each metaphor makes me feel but the style just slides them through the brain. also the leaps in this poem are Amazing and Brave and Talented; the poems end so open and the subject seems to change so radically at the middle/end of many poems (from metaphors of bosses to her daughter, but not bridging the gap or going full circle with it). aspirational tbh

i loved the slippery sense of what the boss is about:
- there's definitely just the boss as an idea that we are all powerless in relation to something else; the actual corporate capitalist system, time and aging (a LOT of poems mourning/depicting her father's stroke and loss of self after), family and society generally . we are all trapped/behooven to something; i like the repeated way that these poems mention that bosses have bosses too; smthng post-modern/late-capitalist abt how everyone is both a perpetrator and a victim; no identifiable final king to behead
- the capitalist - but also immigrant! and liberal feminist! - pressure to be a boss, to be a boss internally, to make your dad proud by being a boss; and also about not wanting to be a boss! about not wanting to be in control and responsible! all cool themes. i like the kind of double-edgedness of the POV observing that their child might be a good boss one day, or is one the way to being a good boss; it is both a survival instinct to want your child to assimilate into capital, and also a cruel thing that to survive is to sort of dehumanize by becoming a boss
- a lot of this collection is about losing her father to a stroke, and part of that is he used to be a "boss"; in the corporate sense of having an email account (can't remember any passwords anymore) and having memory/information around his job (stock trading / finance maybe?); and how he doesn't have those anymore. it's interesting and again feels late capital that there is this textured bit about how he can't log into email, and it is juxtaposed with poems about how he can't remember the author's name; father inextricable from corpocracy, and personhood inextricable from power.

the poems about Edward Hopper paintings were also v interesting to track, in that estranged from other people under capital way; i like how the POV is trying to identify who is the boss and who is the employee, that this is the only approach to these paintings that can be mustered.

read this collection

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I was blown away by the first poem this book:

I Once Was a Child
I once was a child am a child am someone's child
not my mother's not my father's the boss
gave us special treatment treatment for something
special a lollipop or a sticker glitter from the

toy box the better we did the better the plastic prize made
in China one year everyone got a spinning top
one year everyone got a tap on their shoulders
one year everyone was fired everyone

fired but me one year we all lost our words one year
my father lost his words to a stroke
a stroke of bad luck stuck his words
used to be so worldly his words fired

him let him go without notice can they do that
can she do that yes she can in this land she can
once we sang songs around a piano this land is your land
this land is my land in this land someone always

owns the land in this land someone who owns
the land owns the buildings on the land owns
the people in the buildings unless an earthquake
sucks the land in like a long noodle

But here's the thing. If you're thinking "wow that was great I'd like to read 46 pages of that (and I'd like most of the poems to be about "the boss" and/or Edward Hopper paintings," then you are in luck!!  Because that's what this book is!  It's 46 pages of that!  

It all became a bit too same-same and lost its kapow impact.  

I discovered that these poems have a huge impact if read aloud, the rhythm and internal rhyme structure really leaps out at you.  I highly recommend reading them aloud!

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edward Hopper's Chair Car
Everything green everything grown and aglow
everything looks sour like a green
apple sucker the woman reading a book doesn't
look like a sucker but she doesn't

look like a boss either doesn't look cross doesn't cross
her legs the woman across from her looks
like a boss she wears a red blur she looks at
the woman reading with the stare

of a boss a what-are-you-doing stare the woman reading
like a worker unaware of the glare
unaware of someone writing an algorithm to
read her emails the woman with the

hat and the man cannot be bosses they look down
look away he looks at a white door without
handles and realises there's no way out she is
about to get a demotion passed

over because of her emotion even
the chairs position themselves so they
can look the most lost at the next stop so they can
shiver at the touch of a boss (11)

--

The Boss Wears a White Vest
The boss wears a white vest a white face through
the hole of a 700-fill-power vest
the boss keeps her body heat in the down vest
I want to power down the boss

the boss keeps her power the boss's new boss
doesn't like her the boss's old boss doesn't
like her it doesn't matter the boss keeps us in her
hand warmer pockets her pockets

filled with treats in the shapes of imported hearts
we are all imported from somewhere the boss
talks about our heritage her adage starts with
I think you are I think my age is

four my cage is made of tear-resistant
nylon shell my four-year-old daughter still
listens to me I am the boss and I like it I
see why the boss likes it (24)

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

IN THE MANY courses on "leadership" being offered across this wide and deluded land, does poetry ever occur on a syllabus? Rarely if ever, I would assume. I just did a Google search for "poems about leadership" and found Kipling's "If" (no surprise), Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (hmm), and Hughes's "A Dream Deferred" (what?), so I am guessing no one who teaches leadership classes has given this possibility much thought.

Well! Let me recommend to all teachers of leadership that they offer their students this slim volume of poems from 2013. The poetry is excellent. Chang adopts a tumbling, unpunctuated flow that makes a good match for the churning moil in the consciousness of a worker. The language sparkles with playful wit but also has an iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove satiric wallop. The book's really great accomplishment, though, is its making radiantly plain how workers feel about bosses, even modern, enlightened bosses. And that is something every would-be leader ought to know.

The Boss also includes several ekphrastic poems base on Edward Hopper paintings, whose night time urban office interiors make a perfect complement to walls-closing-in claustrophobia of the "Boss" poems.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a remarkable consistency to the poems in this collection: line breaks and line lengths are consistent, thematic concerns are consistent, the irrelevant play with rhythm and rhyme are consistent. While each individual poem is interesting, together the result can feel overwhelming and breathless--in short, while both the individual poems and the collection feels intentional, reading the collection is a very different experience from reading poems separately. Some readers will find this trying while others will marvel at the overall effect it creates. Yet with the focus on trying to balance a life, employment, and the bourgeois work-a-day world with the private work-a-day world this monotony and breakneck consistency seem thematically appropriate. McSweeney's keeps knocking it out of the park, and this does feel like a publisher that understands how this is both consistent with and a departure from Chang's other work. Recommended highly with the caveat that some people will not really enjoy the experience.

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the most formally experimental poetry I've read in a long time, with lines that are overtly unnatural in their abrupt shifts and repetitions, but also not entirely musical. It's a bit like a set of gears that are slightly off, grinding laboriously along and then occasionally slipping smoothly into place. The poems are roughly organized around the concept of work (almost every poem features the word boss) and what it does to human relationships, and to the author's vigorous toddler and declining father. It's not the kind of collection that you fall in love with (or at least I didn't), but rather one that invites a more detached appreciation, where you find yourself arrested by and admiring of certain lines, for instance. Still, I'm curious to read more of her work.

[Brittany Mishra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chang grapples with her daily life in the office and at home. Many of the poems are ways of struggling with the comparisons and language that we face at work and it home. At the same time, Chang is taking care of her father who is losing his memory and his language. All of these poems try to make sense of language, but ultimately, through form, Chang shows that making sense will fail. That there is so much meaning lost in the words that bombard us in our world of office politics, politics, world events, caring for toddlers and aging parents. So much is lost and trying to make sense of it is almost futile, confusing and beautiful at the same time. I enjoyed this collection. It challenged me and made me rethink my relationship with form and language. It made me rethink what I think I know.

[Lynne Fort · Rating 5 out of 5]

You might not think corporate America is a particularly poetic subject, but Victoria Chang would prove you wrong. I found it really refreshing to read about that in a poetry collection because I definitely related to a lot of the experiences and emotions she described. Also, she writes a lot about her father having aphasia, which will hit home for anyone who has watched a parent or grandparent go through cognitive decline. I loved these poems and I think most readers will find something to connect to in this collection.

[Jacob Kimmel · Rating 5 out of 5]

chang finds a single character that explains all other characters. with a single form as the vessel, chang wanders to the edge where our humanity ends -- as biology fails us & the lives we once treasured, as we fail our biology & become something less than ourselves on the weekday, as america swallows a child & asks her to break promises. 'the boss' helps you take a frightened part of yourself out and examine it on the table.

[Dyson Kona · Rating 4 out of 5]

great poetry, a very meditative read as every poem takes on the same form and similar diction: four line stanzas shot off by iterating the title of the poem as the first line with handing indented second stanza lines. uses rhyme in a very elementary but effective way which again adds to the controlled chaos of the reading experience, you get a picture of a family, but more importantly what that family and every family operates under.

[Matthew Yeldon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Favourite Line: “… how tiresome to spend/a lifetime buttoning things how I wish to/unbutton the moon from the tar sky…”

Favourite Poem: I Once Was a Child

Concept albums only work if each song sounds different, rhythms change, and the listener enjoys the ride and its lessons. I expect the same from poetry. This is far too repetitive. I got to about the halfway point and started predicting words and lines that would follow. It started feeling too Dr Seuss-ish.

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too gimmicky maybe. A lot of word play and sudden shifts in topic. Several pieces are based on Edward Hopper paintings - mostly those with an office setting. Her father and her daughter are also recurring topics.

Favorites:
"I Once Had a Good Boss"
"Edward Hopper's Office In a Small City"
"The Boss Is a No-Fly Zone"

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely adore this book. Lines like cyclones full of repetition and dizzying mayhem only to land on such powerful final lines like 'the boss / jabs the workers trades barbs with // the workers the workers continue to do a fine job / the boss's boss's boss just wants a fine / job closes his outer lobe unless his son coughs / like a sea at night." What a great project book.

[Megan Donahue · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was something hypnotic and zen in the rhythmic stream of consciousness poems by Victoria Chang in The Boss. Read aloud, the natural flow and rotating of ideas came out effortlessly in a meditative sort of manner. The collection brings together work and home life in the natural balance is maintains for many spliced with being someone’s child, having children, and who/what is the boss.

[Sammy Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never thought in my wildest dreams I would give a poetry book five stars. Chang's almost-tongue-twisters examine the worlds of corporate America, motherhood, and her father's mental decline. There are a series of poems based on Edward Hopper's office paintings, and it was a delight to read while looking at the artwork.

[Ja'net · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a huge fan of Victoria Chang's last three books, Dear Memory, Obit, and Barbie Chang. This one is not nearly as strong as those three, but it does seem like a precursor to Barbie Chang in rhythm, theme, and form. Even though it sometimes feels a little too clever for its own good, it's still worth a read.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unique to me is a collection of poems that echo and repeat and carry a few themes, intertwined like a rope. Can’t remember ever reading anything like it. It’s all here - work, stress, family, mortality, America, late stage capitalism, parents, children, being a parent, being a cog in the wheel that grinds us all to dust. Wow.

[Bonisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorites -

- I once was a child
- there is only one
- I only knew dictators
- some days one day
- the boss looks over us
- there are two ways
- one the boss fired
- the boss calls us at home
- edward hopper's office at night

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5-4

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Achievement Society, so heady, I mean made-of-shrewd-not-smart curses hurled at the hierarchies of the workaday world, so far from a poem's order Auden called it "faery."

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gah.

I read this in an afternoon because I loved it so much. Now I just need to come back and read it again. And again. And again. Oh, bosses. And bossiness. Boss me!