With My Back to the World

‘In Agnes Martin’s grid paintings, each pale rectangle can feel like an hour, a day, or a year. The effect of all these small variations seen at once approximates the overwhelming fact of other lives. With My Back to the World gives Victoria Chang that same kind of quiet, intimate, constrained but infinite room to work in. This book is the record of an artful, attentive mind, full of startling insights (“My solitude is like the grass. I become so aware of its presence that it too begins to feel like an audience”), a testament to care, integrity, and persistence’ * Elisa Gabbert *‘Victoria Chang’s lucid and playful poetry surprised and moved me with its friendly abundance of Koanlike lines-stimulating yet calming news from the dreamy outskirts of human consciousness’ * Tao Lin *The painterly, meditative latest from Chang (after Circle) enters in a dialogue with the visual artists Agnes Martin and On Kawara … This collection is full of memorable insights as Chang experiments with erased and occluded work, all the while operating in the realm of feeling, where “desire is the only thing/ with nerve endings.” These elegiac poems thoughtfully balance the head and the heart * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *

Throughout this exhilarating collection Chang’s own illustrations parallel the energy her writingconveys… Chang’s lines are immediate and affecting… they exist to be seen and felt, read and absorbed

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is, With My Back to the World (Corsair, 2024). A few of her recent books of poetry include The Trees Witness Everything and OBIT, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as longlisted for the National Book Award. Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief was published in 2021. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

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