In their mix of tenderness, delicacy of observation, their feel for textures, their refined and refining intelligence, all brought to bear by a robust sensibilty that doesn't flinch in the face of the harder matters of absence, loss, grief, the poems of Leslie Chang compose a complete, remembered, lived-in world . Unmarked by rhetorical showiness, Chang's pitch-perfect sketches enter unobtrusively into the lives of her family elders with a profound understanding, the result of contemplation, patience, silence. Taken together, the poems compose an elegiac celebration of family life--bridging two or three generations, two countries, two different worlds, all realized at a distance and in memory, and brought back to life in these brief, brilliant conjurings. 'You knew how to receive a guest,' she says in one poem: 'With a gift.' In Things That No Longer Delight Me, Leslie Chang offers us many such welcoming gifts, all wrapped in what she justly calls 'the language of the here and now.' -----Eamon Grennan.