An excerpt from today’s article in the NY Times about Brooklyn’s new poet laureate, who lives in Park Slope:

AFTER Tina Chang puts her 7-month-old son, Roman, to bed, she pads, barefoot, about three feet over to her office, where a desk cohabits with the changing table. She opens the window to take in the sights and sounds of her neighborhood, Park Slope — men arguing on the street, neighbors sipping wine on fire escapes, apartment lights twinkling. She opens a spiral notebook from the 99-cent store and begins scribbling. One night she started with a recipe for black bean sauce, another with the first line of a rejection letter from a literary journal, another with a to-do list.

“Then something takes over,” said Ms. Chang, 40. Over days, weeks, months, her stream-of-consciousness musings grow into poems like “Birthing a Boy”:

My child was once a thought and he had

no name, locked in the stall of my making.

The child was housed inside me for a long time,

held still in water, his limbs floating on a screen,

fingerprints intricate as aerial maps.

Ms. Chang is no ordinary journal keeper: She is a college teacher, published author and Brooklyn’s new poet laureate, the fourth person — and first woman — to fill the august, if odd, post. But don’t be intimidated. One of her chief goals is to “demystify the role of the poet.”