Status Updates From Barbie Chang

Feeling quietly undone by how these poems hold the exhausted resilience of women, especially the kind shaped by performance, motherhood, class anxiety, and the pressure to remain “composed” through all of it.

Barbie Chang knows that the outline of a tree can never be a tree

“there are dangers
in the sea there is sincerity in the sea”

“I am broken down in
this valley no goodwill I am embroidered
with love and grief with the exact moment
your breathing becomes slow and deep”

“when I ask the tree which
way it just points in every direction”