Obit

‘In Chang’s telling, grief shoots off in all directions, killing off dozens of other things: appetite, blame, the deceased’s old clothes. Chang sets out to catalogue them all, and does so with rangy metaphysical imagination and terse precision…[a] solemn, gorgeous, understated book’ – Stephanie Sy-Quia * TLS *
Chang’s new collection explores her father’s illness and her mother’s death, treating mortality as a constantly shifting enigma. A serene acceptance of grief * New York Times ‘100 Most Notable Books 2020’ *
Exceptional … Chang’s poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore * Publishers Weekly, starred review *
These are poems that reproduce the logic and feeling of loss?a gift for anyone who has struggled to find words to express grief * NPR *
[Obit] is heartbreaking and enthralling. It sings and instructs. It is a world all its own – Ilya Kaminsky * The Week *
Victoria Chang has created something powerful and unconventional. These poems are zinger curveballs * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Chang has created a unique poetic construct … The feeling of hope is a theme throughout this solid collection, in variations Chang evokes with grace * Booklist *
Chang is consistently a poet who resurrects mediums, her work living within surprising spaces and forms, and both exposing and surpassing the possibilities for those structures … Chang has the rare poetic talent to follow the edges of dark comedy to find sentiment rather than irony * The Millions *
Each poem is a masterwork of compression and compassion * Kenyon Review *

Victoria Chang’s latest book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything. Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory, was published in 2021. OBIT, her prior book of poems was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Must-Read Book, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also longlisted for a National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and lives in Los Angeles and is a faculty member within Antioch’s low-residency MFA Program.

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