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Zhang’s observations, peppered
cheekily with Internet shorthand, are
flanked by graphic and often gross
imagery —something readers of her past
books, the short-story collection Sour
Heart and her poetry debut Dear Jenny,
We Are All Find will recognize. Raw, and
sometimes violent, feelings
are depicted in visceral de-
scriptions of bodily fluids and
functions—as well as frequent
usage of Zhang’s apparent fa-
vorite expletive, the C word.
Reading these poems, one
gets the sense that Zhang
wants to overwhelm readers—
not to hold them in her thrall,
although she could easily do
so, but to fulfill an earnest wish
for them to feel the richness of every-
thing that they can, emotionally and
physically, even if that complicates their
reality. It’s something she knows well
from personal experience. “I’m not an
easy woman,” she declares. “And why
would you want to be?” □To read Jenny Zhang is To embrace
primal states: pleasure, hunger, longing
and rage. In her second book of poetry,
My Baby First Birthday, Zhang glories
in the messiness of living while probing
how the instinct to nurture can some-
times be matched by the impulse to
destroy.
In 97 poems, Zhang covers
everything from the broadly
political, like the #MeToo
movement and white sav-
iors, to the intimately per-
sonal, such as kink and giving
birth, in graphic and physical
verse. The collection is fasci-
nated with both motherhood
and new life—the fierce giv-
ing and taking of uncondi-
tional love and the traumas that can re-
sult from this exchange. “There are too
many centuries of mothers loving their
mothers/ I will be the first to love my-
self more than I love my mother,” Zhang
muses in “The Universal Energy Is
About to Intervene in Your Life.”
Divided into four
sections named for
the seasons, the col-
lection also confronts
the injustices of a
world whose struc-
tures are cruel to
those they weren’t
built to protect.
Zhang is at her sharp-
est when she leans
into the specificity
and brutal humor
of this. “When did
I agree to be a text-
book/ for you and
your whole dumb
family,” she asks.
“My people make
history if they just
stay alive/ well any-
thing is easy if yr ex-
istence is wanted.”POETRY
The cathartic chaos of Jenny Zhang
By Cady LangFICTION
A biblical
retelling, done
three waysTwice a day for the past month,
40-something mom Lily has
read the same book to her
two children—and she’s had
enough. It’s a biblical tale
about a king in Persia who
holds a pageant to find a new
wife after he banishes his first
one. He settles on Esther, a
young Jewish woman who is
not ready to be married, and
especially not to him. The
details, Lily remarks, are not
that important. It’s the end that
matters: “The second queen,
Esther, is the hero.”
But is she, really? Anna
Solomon explores the
answer in her twisty new
novel, The Book of V. Lily is
just one of three narrators.
She’s joined by Esther
herself—a teenager navigating
the politics of ancient
Persia—as well as Vivian
Barr, a Senator’s wife living in
Nixon-era Washington, D.C.
Solomon moves among
the women’s voices as
each embarks on her own
journey. Although their
stories couldn’t begin
more differently, the author
weaves in connective threads
to comment on the
timelessness of male power.
Switching among these
three distinct worlds
seamlessly, The Book of V.’s
narrative is fast-paced and
well balanced. Throughout,
Solomon asks how much life—
rights, agency and ambition—
has changed for women now
from how it was centuries ago.
The answer she offers may not
be the one we’d all like to hear.
ZHANG: COURTESY JENNY ZHANG —A.G.
▷
Zhang, born
in Shanghai,
grew up in
New York City