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Obit
Los Angeles Times Book Prize
PEN Voelcker Award
Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize
New York Times 100 Notable Books
Time Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books
NPR’s Best Books
National Book Award in Poetry, Longlist
National Book Critics Circle, Finalist
Griffin Poetry Prize, Shortlist
Frank Sanchez Book Award
After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died (‘civility,’ ‘language,’ ‘the future,’ ‘Mother’s blue dress’) and the cultural impact of death on the living. Loss, and the love for the dead, becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.
‘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
PEN Voelcker Award
Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize
New York Times 100 Notable Books
Time Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books
NPR’s Best Books
National Book Award in Poetry, Longlist
National Book Critics Circle, Finalist
Griffin Poetry Prize, Shortlist
Frank Sanchez Book Award
After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died (‘civility,’ ‘language,’ ‘the future,’ ‘Mother’s blue dress’) and the cultural impact of death on the living. Loss, and the love for the dead, becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.
‘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
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Reviews
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
Each poem is a masterwork of compression and compassion
Victoria Chang has created something powerful and unconventional. These poems are zinger curveballs
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
'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'
These are poems that reproduce the logic and feeling of loss?a gift for anyone who has struggled to find words to express grief
Chang has created a unique poetic construct . . . The feeling of hope is a theme throughout this solid collection, in variations Chang evokes with grace
[Obit] is heartbreaking and enthralling. It sings and instructs. It is a world all its own
Exceptional . . . Chang's poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore