So Long This Wound Stayed Open
So Long This Wound Stayed Open is a map toward forgiving and healing your inner child. In her poetry collection, Chang names core wounds like fear of rejection, loss of heritage and home, and welcomes them into her arms, saying: we need not let our scars turn us into islands. Let them instead be the light others use to find us in the dark. (ELJ Editions, 2024)
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This collection teaches not just how to recognize the wound, but also how to dress it, how to hold its tender flesh and apply the pressure that gives a good hurt, a hurt that helps us heal. A book of doors to wander through and linger.
In this exquisite debut, she reminds us of what it means to experience life in its most complicated, most real—which is to say most beautiful—moments. This book is a gift—an unforgettable act of love.
Michael Shewmaker, author of Penumbra
Juliana Chang’s lucid, searching debut is a thrilling inquiry into shame and belonging, with all the despair and triumph of a bildungsroman: leave-takings and arrivals, loves yearned for and lost and discovered afresh, the nascent self becoming, clarifying, looking always to the past – the inherited and the lived – to make sense of the bewildering now. A remarkable first book.
Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer
This book will break your heart, but not without tending to the wound. Through deep care for words and their origins, for family, and for friendship, Juliana Chang sows the sounds of a new kind of belonging, one that stitches together a home from red bean pancakes and dandelion crowns.
Stephanie Niu, author of Survived By