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Obit
The breakout collection about grief, loss and living from award-winning Asian American poet Victoria Chang, whose star is rising.
When someone you love dies, everything dies. Her blue dress dies. Empathy dies. Friendships die. You, having survived, die. Obit is a stunning lyrical distillation of grief, written by Victoria Chang after the death of her mother.
Initially refusing to write elegies for fear of cliche, Chang heard the word 'obit' and was moved by the strength of its sound, the long O and the hard T. She began writing obituaries for the many casualties of death - one long, skinny rectangle to chronicle each person, experience, object gone - and this became a new form with which to study sorrow. Chang's poetic obituaries are punctuated by formal interruptions, including a series of tankas that reflect on the emotional paradox of parenting while grappling with parental loss.
In writing a book about grief, Victoria Chang holds a mirror to life; Obit reveals a stubborn search for language and for hope.
'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 Notable Books of 2020"
'Exceptional... Chang's poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore'Publishers Weekly
Review
'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
About the Author
Born in Detroit, Michigan to Taiwanese immigrants, Victoria Chang was educated at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford Business School and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson. She is the author of six books of poetry, including Obit, which was named a 'New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020' and included on Time Magazine's '100 Must-Read Books of 2020'. She lives in Southern California with her family and serves as the Program Chair of Antioch's Low-Residency MFA Program
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