TOY SOLDIERS by MICHAEL CHANG is the fifth chapbook in Abode's 2024-2025 lineup and is officially available for pre-order! All orders will be shipped by early January. There are only 100 copies of this chapbook available, so make sure to get your copy while you can!  
 
Book Description: MICHAEL CHANG's forthcoming chapbook TOY SOLDIERS queers language and culture to critique 21st century living. Alert to the sins and sorrows of our indignant time, driven by fast lingo, tight lines, and erotic vitality, TOY SOLDIERS presses all the relevant and irreverent buttons with cunning bravado. Pleasure is ever allied to pain but "a brief sight of beauty/can serve as a source of renewable energy." Amen. These poems keep it, and us, true.
 
About the Author: MICHAEL CHANG (they/them) is the author of many volumes of poetry, including TOY SOLDIERS (Action, Spectacle, 2024), THINGS A BRIGHT BOY CAN DO (Coach House Books, 2025) & HEROES (845 Press, 2025).
 
Praise for TOY SOLDIERS by MICHAEL CHANG:
 
"In TOY SOLDIERS, Michael Chang continues to brew up a new and distinctive poetry, steeped in New York School precedent and our everyday digital detritus. Lines as nimble, various, and addictive as a TikTok feed model the strange virtues of spacing out, a kind of distraction (“can i have a moment / to stop paying attention”) that points us unexpectedly toward insight. Are these poems, 'namedropping & scanning the room,' hilarious, earnest, opaque, playful, sexy, sardonic, forthright, political, gossipy? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. But above all, as one poem boasts, this is a 'poetry . . . aimed at destroying ugly shit.' Take cover: that aim is somehow at once wild and true." - CHAD BENNETT
 
"Michael Chang’s TOY SOLDIERS is a world of text speak and pop culture—of love and loathing, of happiness and audacity. Playful language scattered throughout the collection mimics everyday speech in a voice at times joyful, at times crass, at others pointed. Chang is a remarkably brave poet, choosing to hold oneself high under the crush of so much fleeting stimuli, amid the challenges of living in a rigid society—and, in so doing, finding what it truly means to be human. Well done." - INA CARIÑO
 
"Michael Chang cuts through language to find it hydralike; more comes sprung and writhing from the slices. TOY SOLDIERS, then, is a collection in which an elliptical thought pullulates with blunt terminuses and emerging associations. To my reading, Chang’s (heart-/side-) eyes dissect desire in a world so thick with people, food, and lives to want that there’s a 'nobel for loneliness' That same isolation feels highlighted by lurking cishet pathological de-desire, a revulsion hapless as it is murderous. Against this threat, Chang’s remarkable and protean poems are as tactical as they are paratactic, 'purposefully undignified' and 'aimed at destroying ugly shit.' Here’s hoping it doesn’t grow back." - DOUGLAS KEARNEY
 
"Alert to the sins and sorrows of our indignant time, driven by fast lingo, tight lines, and erotic vitality, in which every angel is terrifying, Michael Chang presses all the relevant and irreverent buttons with cunning bravado. Pleasure is ever allied to pain but 'a brief sight of beauty / can serve as a source of renewable energy.' Amen. These poems keep it, and us, true." - ANN LAUTERBACH
 
"Michael Chang’s poems sprout like phosphorescent mushrooms in a forest of the ordinary. Dripping with wit and sonic absurdity, reading Chang is like watching a magician juggle fire and feathers—a spectacle that will leave you in delightful disarray." - KARYNA MCGLYNN
 
"Imagine if you will a poet writing in 2024 who, through some kind of strange time warping phenomenon, discovers the collected diaries and notebooks of a poet of 200 years in the future. Our 2024 poet takes the personal writings of the future poet and reorganizes them into a sort of fantastic cadavre exquis; a hyper-verbal, rich, firing-on-all-cylinders matrix in which the entirety of one person’s experiences—aesthetic, sexual, literary, quotidian, political—take shape, extend, change, contradict themselves. This might give some idea of the energy of the poems in Michael Chang’s TOY SOLDIERS. Performative yet intimate, glittering yet earthy, talking to us with a Frank O’Hara-esque personism, erudite and timely and radically free in outlook, these poems are fun and dazzling documents of a life. That poet of the future turns out to be Michael Chang." - GEOFFREY NUTTER
 
"Michael Chang’s TOY SOLDIERS is what happens when play turns deadly serious, when the gameboard flips to reveal, of all things, real life. These are fierce poems of intense flavor, of extreme volume: 'all the mothers singing / pickled by birds / shredded into wild ginger.' There is no way off this ride, so best to grip hard at whatever you’ve got, orwhoever is sitting near you. And yes, love shines here, or at least a glimmer of it. 'how do u flirt w. someone who has everything ???' It starts, I think, with the sheer heat of the spoken word." - BEN PURKERT
 
"Tenacious, quick-witted, and teeming with bite, this collection is not for the faint. The lines shift decisively from one turn to the next, searing in their shrewd banter of and with language. The poems bubble and burst, they hiss and boil, and then they swerve back around for a raucously good time. With gusto and guts, Michael Chang thrills while tearing into the social, cultural, and political fabric of our world." - MAI DER VANG
 
ISBN: 979-8-9900598-4-9
Publication Date: 1/1/2025
Copies will officially be distributed on January 1st.