Barrelhouse Reviews: Drakkar Noir, by Michael Chang
Review by Julian Day
Bateau Press / May 2021 / 54 pages
Drakkar Noir was one of the iconic men’s fragrances of the 1980s. The name is deliberately and overtly masculine: the drakkars were Viking longships, used in exploration and conquest, and noir, black, carries implications of darkness, brooding, and mystery. These connotations were reflected in the fragrance’s advertising: in one magazine ad, against a black background, a man’s forearm, the hand grasping a bottle of Drakkar Noir, a woman’s hand desperately clutching his wrist; and underneath, la douce violence d’un parfum d’homme.
“The soft violence of a men’s perfume”—a perfume, sure, but hyper-masculine, aggressive and sexual, the fragrance itself distinctively herbal and woody. Every high school senior or bar-hopper who put it on in 1985 hoped to improve, to fix some part of themselves perceived as broken or insufficient, to be transformed into a more powerful, more desirable version of themselves.
It’s appropriate, then, that Michael Chang chose the fragrance as the chapbook’s title. Scent is used to normalize, to homogenize—to say this represents what I want to be, and step into it—and the poems of this collection are built around this desire, this lack and want. Wanting boys, wanting men, wanting and struggling to find a place in their world. Scent is a cover but also a promise, and Drakkar Noir, both the fragrance and the collection, promise bolder. Throughout, Chang demonstrates what it is to be what white America is not—Asian, queer—and the innate precarity of that situation, showing us what happens to those standing outside what a white supremacist structure protects.
Chang’s poems show flashes of vulnerability, guarded by quips and barbs, sarcasm and one-liners. In “HIGH DRAMA PANDA FURY,” they lay out a list of wants—to have nice legs, be tired after practice, and otherwise find comfort in the life of the privilege given to the white student athlete—but then they pull this back to joke sharply that
I wonder why ppl don’t ask for help
I mean look at you
You clearly need a lot of it
The poems’ speakers weave back and forth, refusing to be pinned down—or worse, to be boring, to simply speak a truth and move on. Chang’s poems just as often go for a laugh as for the jugular, and as they progress, Chang moves from form to form, never resting, unwilling to be bound within a particular poetic structure. A relentless shapeshifter, Chang reveals the truth of things, whether the wandering desires of supposedly-straight boys (“Why boys who can’t spell—Nic, Wil—usually cute :,) :’( / They give you comfort, make eyes at you when their gf’s not looking”), or the longing to undo and change one’s entire self (“All my life I have wished / to be somebody else”). Perhaps the most visually striking poem is “关你屁事 NONE OF YOUR BEESWAX,” whose center-split form recalls Doyali Islam’s split sonnets from heft. Chang’s version is peppered with jabs (“i like your tongue b/c it’s pink / you’re pinky i’m the brain,” “don’t mean to be bawdy / but show us that body”), yet also contains moments of intense vulnerability:
some ppl are worth more than rubies
rubles, not rubies
Ha ha, only kidding: in one line, the bare truth; in the next, walking it all back. Chang’s diction has a breezy, irreverent feel, borrowing heavily from internet shorthand—“ppl,” “b/c,” “gf,” emoticons—and incorporates fragments of Chinese as well. A number of titles use both Chinese and English, and this dynamic mirrors and emphasizes particular words. In “遇见 ENCOUNTER,” for example, “遇见” translates to “meet,” and the poem details the desire and lust the speaker feels as they are attracted to people and a worldview “so opposed, so contrary to mine.” Similarly, in “匪夷所思 UNBELIEVABLE ZUIHITSU” (“匪夷所思” = incredible), Chang lays out a story about a relationship with a “hot coltish boy,” describing their fantasies about making a life together before the unbelievable becomes obvious, Chang segueing from what could have been into unbridgeable differences.
Throughout Drakkar Noir, Chang traces themes of unbelonging, of being outside—not just of white America, but straight America as well. As they write in “SEAN ★ LENNON,”
I understand how tenuous existence can be,
when affirmative action can be swept away by the will of the voters,
when your marriage can be invalidated by a majority vote,
when doing what is right & moral can be derided as amnesty.
I know how something can disappear as quickly as it blooms,
how it can be snatched out of your grasp the second you put a name to it.
Chang is keenly aware of the problems with attraction to people and places privileged by white supremacy, the way this attraction guarantees tenuousness and instability for everyone else. Their poems call attention to this dynamic sometimes directly, but often by wrapping the truth with sly humour and bombast in a style all Chang’s own. Their work is lively, charged, and distinctive.
It’s easy to become lost in these poems, watching as Chang layers alienation and longing with humor and insults; a quick taunt, a fierce left hook. Throughout the collection, they build out dualities of want and worry, attraction and repulsion. Each flash of tenderness is beautiful and hard-won. “I know absurdity, thrive on abandonment,” Chang writes in “SHELF STABLE,” and although they conclude that “I will never shake this feeling of fraudulence, of insufficiency” (“遇见 ENCOUNTER”), they still manage to find some room for hope in a deeply hostile world: “Why is it taboo to project your feelings onto someone, assuming they are worthy? / … / Deceit aside, you have me. You have me.”
Julian Day’s debut chapbook is Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press, 2021). His work has recently appeared in periodicities and Juniper, and is forthcoming in This Magazine. He lives in Winnipeg.