Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Victoria Chang is the author of Dear Memory. Her poetry books include OBIT, Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. OBIT received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN Voeckler Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was long-listed for the National Book Award. She is also the author of a children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, illustrated by Marla Frazee and named a New York Times Notable Book, and a middle grade novel, Love, Love. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Katherine Min MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch University’s low-residency MFA program.
<b>Praise for <i>Dear Memory</i></b><br /><br />"[<i>Dear Memory</i>] is an open-ended inquiry not of a bounded life but of an ongoing present, full of longing and imperfection . . . Chang has followed language to the edge of what she knows; the question her book asks is whether language can go further still . . . Her own project is not to erase those incisions—or even, as a child might hope, to heal them—but to retrace and redescribe them. If there are wounds in the past, she seeks to live with them as scars." <b><i>—New Yorker</i></b><p><br /></p><p>"Groundbreaking . . . Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." <b>—Thúy Dinh, NPR</b><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>"Chang's work is excavation, a digging through the muck of society for an existential clarity, a cultural clarity and a general clarity of self." <b>—<i>New York Times Book Review</i></b></p><p><br /></p><p>"Both a chronicling of [Chang's] family's history and a powerful, stirring rumination on ancestry, inherited trauma and home." <b>—<i>TIME Magazine</i>, "Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2021"</b></p><p><br /></p><p>"[<i>Dear Memory</i> is] a collage of fragments constituting a moving portrait of the poet herself." <b>—<i>Los Angeles Times</i>, "Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2021"</b></p><p><br /></p><p>"<i>Dear Memory</i> is the work of a gifted poet, a wordsmith who is conscious that absent a chance to be an eyewitness to the past, we are left to spin our own webs of emotional significance and nostalgia." <b>—Lorraine Berry, <i>Minneapolis Star Tribune</i></b></p><p><br /></p><p>"After the impressive formal innovations of her 2020 book, <i>OBIT</i>, which won multiple national awards, Chang continues to find new ways to plumb her experiences on the page . . . Depending on what one brings to this book, each reader may find their own moment of goosebumps or tears . . . This book is moving in a way that transcends story and message; it captures a pure sense of another person's heart." —<b><i>Kirkus Reviews</i>, Starred Review</b><br /><br />
"Chang has assembled a collection of letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as well as family memorabilia, creating not just a moving family history but a rumination on the creative and self-shaping act of remembering." —<b>Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"</b><br /><br />
"A moving consideration of ancestry and loss . . . [Chang's] prose is sharp and strong—memory is the 'exit wound of joy,' she writes—and her creativity shines in her incorporation of the collage-like visual elements, which add depth. Fans of Chang's poetry will be delighted." —<b><i>Publishers Weekly</i>, Starred Review</b><br /><br />"Ever inventive, ever searching, Chang bends genres to approach an unmanageable emotion." <b><i>—Observer</i></b></p><p><br /></p><p>"These letters to the past that are paving stones to the future is the verdant ground that Victoria Chang explores in these, dare I say, memorable essays." <b>—<i>Colorado Review</i></b></p><p><br /></p><p>“Victoria Chang's <i>Dear Memory</i> is a tender exploration of grief, an excavation into stories untold, memories unshared, the treasures that await our discoveries if we trace through the lives that held ours. It is a vulnerable and evocative experience of what it means to miss, to yearn, to return to the pieces of our most beloved." —Kao Kalia Yang</p><p><b><br /></b></p><p>
"Those who were fans of Chang's previous book, <i>Obit</i>, will find some similar (yet still refreshing) innovations of style and feeling in <i>Dear Memory</i>. In this genre-bending and deeply personal work, Chang manipulates the loose form of letter-writing to build an archive of emotion out of an archive of familial history. This collection takes seriously the literary value of non-traditional literary elements such as collage-making, snippets of memorabilia, drawings in journals, and bureaucratic debris. This work emphasizes that alongside her masterful and vulnerable writing, these are, in fact, the bits and pieces which have most tangibly shaped our history and experience. Her boundary-pushing exploration of herself is moving and intimate on levels beyond expectation. <i>Dear Memory</i> marks an important step in the evolution of Chang's work, and I look forward to seeing its impact unfold in the literary sphere." —<b>Mrittika Ghosh, Seminary Co-op Bookstore</b><br /><br />
"Victoria Chang's <i>Dear Memory</i> grapples with the nature of memory and how one bears the personal traumas of those who came before. Using a collection of ephemera left by her mother as a point of departure, the accomplished poet frames letters to intimates as a way to navigate her own grief and explore memories of what shaped her sense of self while growing up. While the papers left behind by Chang's mother are a record of past events, Chang's letters demonstrate how their effects continue to resonate—across time, oceans, and through generations. Imaginatively creating a conversation between past and present, Chang fills in gaps and asks what it means to truly know oneself through one's own history." —<b>Isa S. Politics & Prose</b><br /><br />
<b>Praise for Victoria Chang</b><br /><br />
“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.”—<b><i>The Millions</i></b><br /><br />
“Chang’s star is rising, and lucky for us, she writes with compassion, grace, and a true ethical sensibility.”—<b><i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i></b><br /><br />
“Many poets display a single strength. Some write beautiful nature poems, others write well about relationships, still others have a gift for addressing issues like politics or economics. Chang can do it all.”—<b><i>Kansas City Star</i></b><br /><br />
<b>Praise for <i>OBIT</i></b><br /><br />
<b>Finalist for the 2021 PEN / Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection</b><br />
<b>Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry</b><br />
<b>Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry</b><br /><br />
“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 emerges from these poems.”—<b><i>New York Times</i></b>, “100 Notable Books of 2020”<br /><br />
“Chang’s sharp crystallizations of the pain and disorientation of death, and the way it reverberates through life, bring us to the raw heart of grief without the overblown language of classical elegy. These are poems that reproduce the logic and feeling of loss—a gift for anyone who has struggled to find words to express grief.”—<b>NPR</b><br /><br />
“In [<i>OBIT</i>], mortality is not a before and after state, but rather a constantly shifting enigma.”—<b><i>New York Times Book Review</i></b><br /><br />
“Exceptional . . . Chang’s poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore.”—<b><i>Publishers Weekly</i> (starred review)</b><br /><br />
“Chang has created a unique poetic construct. . . . The feeling of hope is a theme throughout this solid collection, in variations Chang evokes with grace: ‘Hope / is the wildest bird, the one that flies / so fast it will either disappear or burst / into flames.’ Chang’s poetry fine tunes that conflagration with acuity.”—<b><i>Booklist</i></b><br /><br />
“[<b>OBIT</b>] marshals all the resources of poetry against the relentless emotional cascade that’s associated with death—and, very much to its credit, and as a testament to its success, the book has arrived at a kind of momentary stalemate against that cascade.”—<b><i>Rick Barot</i></b><br /><br />
“A long elegy for the poet’s mother, <i>OBIT</i> is the kind of poetry collection that creates a new genre. A reinvention of form? A symphony? A manifesto? All of the above and then some. It is heartbreaking and enthralling. It sings and instructs. It is a world all its own; one that changes ours.”—<b>Ilya Kaminsky</b><br /><br />
“Here we have unmitigated heartbreak—but heartbreak mercifully free of the usual ‘death etiquette’: platitudes of ‘after-lives’ or ‘better offs.’ Thus, Chang has created something powerful and unconventional. These poems are zinger curveballs, and often come from the graveyard’s left field.”—<b><i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i></b><br /><br />
“These obits are fearless. They are also specific and intimate. . . . The emotional power of Chang’s <i>OBIT</i> comes from the grace and honesty with which she turns this familiar form inside out to show us the private side of family, the knotting together of generations, the bewilderment of grief.”—<b><i>Ploughshares</i></b><br /><br />
<b>Praise for <i>Barbie Chang</i></b><br /><br />
“But [Chang’s readers] won’t be the only ones [who like Chang’s new work]—and not even they will expect Chang’s grander scope, her greater nuance, and her more generous attention to its characters’ adult lives. . . . Chang’s punctuation-free lines, like WS Merwin’s, invite overlapping readings and multiple syntax. Her pathos slows down for jokes, apercus, and hyper-contemporary puns. . . . Such invitations are hard to resist, and they ring.”—<b>Stephanie Burt, Academy of American Poets</b><br /><br />
“Chang entrances with wordplay, but the dance never feels hollow: this is performance with poetic soul. . . . Don’t miss the exquisitely crafted litany of linked poems in the middle of the book, evidence how quickly and precisely Chang can turn from comic to comforting to transcendent.”—<b><i>The Millions</i></b><br /><br />
“Chang is emerging as an exciting voice in contemporary poetry, and [<i>Barbie Chang</i>] is undoubtedly her most accomplished volume to date.”—<b><i>Publishers Weekly</i></b></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>
A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Los Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021
For poet Victoria Chang, memory “isn’t something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally.” It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.
Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.
In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.
Today I found a Certificate of Marriage and a translation of it by the President Translation Service. The date is July 26, 1939. Now I know your name: Miss Chang Chi-Yin. I also know you were 27 and Grandfather 26. I wonder if this was considered strange at the time, your being older than him.
I now know you were born on April 29, 1913. Seeing this date makes me cry. The tears are long and rusted. I have tried to tie them together into a long string toward your country. The farthest I’ve ever made it was Kansas. The tornadoes always break my tears.
Dear Grandmother, I now know you were born in Chingwan Hsien, Hopei Province. I google Hopei and see it is in the North of China, where all the good doughy food Mother used to make comes from—the bao zi, jiao zi, and shao bing. I can see how close you were to Beijing and Mongolia.
I learn that you were born one year after the Qing dynasty collapsed. I learn that you lived amid civil war. I wonder if this is why you took your children and left for Taiwan.
I can’t find your town, Chingwan Hsien, on Google because it’s probably spelled another way. After more searching, I figure out it is likely Jing Wan Xian. But I still can’t locate it on the map of Hopei, which I figure out is also Hebei Province.
The Certificate says you were united in matrimony at Chungking City, Szechuan Province. Google says there are thirty million people there. I try to imagine thirty million people who look like me. In that moment, grief freezes.
The Certificate says you were introduced to each other by Mr. Chang Kan-Chen and Mrs. Chou Chi-Ying. I wonder who these people were. I wonder if yours was an arranged marriage or if you loved each other. Or both. I wonder what love looked like in China in 1939.
The Certificate says: These two parties are now united forever in harmony on this auspicious day in taking an oath of mutual fidelity throughout their lives. What happened afterwards, I don’t know. I do know that when I met you, the one time I met you, you were no longer together and hadn’t been in a long time. But Mother never talked about that. Mother only ever bitterly talked about how you favored all of your sons.
The one time I met your former spouse, my grandfather, was when Mother brought me to the arcade to meet him. I played Ms. Pac-Man the whole time, while they stood near the door and talked. Their mouths moved but I couldn’t hear anything. All I remember is the sound of the yellow mouth eating white pellets.
I often think about what the poet Mary Jo Bang wrote about her dead son, What is elegy but the attempt/To rebreathe life/Into what the gone once was/Before he grew to enormity. That is what Mother feels like: an enormity. My history feels even larger. The size of atmosphere.
An elegy reflects on the loss of a loved one. What form can express the loss of something you never knew but knew existed? Lands you never knew? People? Can one experience such a loss? The last definition of absence is the nonexistence or lack of. See how the of hangs there like someone about to jump off a balcony?
I want to believe in the origin story. I want to believe we all desire to know how we came to be, who we came from. I want to know why my fingers are so long, why my mouth naturally frowns, why my back has chronic pain, why I have freckles all over my nose. Why my mind is so restless.
But what if, during her own migration, my mother’s memories migrated, too, and became exiled from their origins? What if both my origin and memory can never be pinned down?
Grandmother, in the list of people present during your marriage, there were two matchmakers, three parents, and a witness. Where was the fourth parent? I now know the names of three of my ancestors: Jin Hsuan-San, Chang Yen-Chen, Pi Pao-Chuan. I also have a photocopy of the original marriage certificate in Chinese. I now know your names in Chinese characters, though I can’t read them well.
My mother had a photocopy of each of these documents. And then she made another copy of the copies. So many copies to forget her past. If I throw them away, does that mean I was never born? In some ways, being born Chinese in America means not being born at all.
Maybe all of our memories are tied to the memories of others. Maybe my memories are tied to Mother’s memories, and Mother’s memories are like objects in a mirror—I see them, but I can’t ever reach them. When Mother died, my exile detached from her exile, and that gap filled with longing.
But with these papers, there’s now a new wind. A Mongolian wind from the North, one I have never smelled before. A new feeling that I, too, come from something, from some people, from somewhere.
***
Dear D,
Do you remember those Fridays in gym class when Ms. A made us jog around the field behind the school? Did you know they tore down the school a few years ago? The school is charred, but the field isn’t. The field is still there. The field foiled the trucks. The field won. My shadow is still in that field, attached to your shadow.
Do you remember how you used to run after me shouting you’re so ugly! How you would be in front of me, turn around and face me, jog backwards and laugh, Why are you so ugly? I yelled back at you with silence.
Dear D, I doubt you remember the fields, but the fields remember. I’ve wanted so many times to return to that field, to hear the grasses tell me what they heard.
Sometimes I wonder if you chased me one time or many times. I wonder how memory can become larger and larger. Does it matter whether you were wearing shorts or not? Whether the shorts had a stripe down each side? I imagine you had tube socks on. I imagine they had blue stripes. Sometimes I think of H, who once threw an icy snowball at my face. Did he do that once or every winter? And M, whenever we were alone, telling me to go back to China.
Sometimes I think about the styles of these bullies—some preferred to work alone, some needed an audience. But all of them had eyes that singed.
We often speak of memory as something that lingers, that returns again and again. Maybe memory is more like a homicide, each time it returns, it’s a new memory, one that has murdered all the memories before.
Last night, we were driving in a car in Montana, a scientist and two poets. The scientist turned off the headlights by accident. All went black. And it was beautiful. For a moment, even trauma was gone. And then he found the switch, the lights came back on, and we were again driving underneath the fog, and all of my memories returned.
In that moment, in the darkness, it felt like I had seen Elizabeth Bishop’s moose:
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church
homely as a house
. . .
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?
But in fact, I had seen nothing. In darkness, my body had emptied of all memories. In that moment, nothing had shape. Maybe Bishop’s moose is death.
Dear D, a while back, I found you on Facebook. I saw two children with curly brown hair. You, like me, must teach your children how to be kind. You looked fit, like a runner. I imagined you running backward again. Step by step, able to shout and laugh at once, a small crowd gathering around you, all the same kids who are friends with me on Facebook now. How they looked on, some laughed.
Sarah was the only one who said anything. When she saw me crying in the locker room, she stopped, asked me if I was okay. Recently, Sarah messaged me and seemed to feel relief that I was still alive. Her concern startled me, as I had spent decades forgetting those early years, telling every new person I met that I had a great childhood. Because I had no history, history could be made, like a painting.
D, I wanted to send you a message and tell you about all the years your face stayed in my body, how you were that fog in Montana. Instead, I silently scrolled through your photos and looked at one where you stood next to Nina at a reunion and had captioned it the one that got away.
Sometimes I think I was the one who got away. From you, those kids, that quiet street on Langlewood Drive in Michigan. But then the fog. There’s an eye in the middle of that fog.
In truth, I am ashamed to write this, to still think about the past, to still have these memories. I wonder if I am ashamed of the memories, the events, or myself. That fundamentally there was something wrong with me, my family, my countries I never knew.
Recently, in her book, All You Will Ever Know, I read about Nicole Chung’s experiences being bullied in a mostly white town, Cathy Park Hong’s experiences being mocked on a school bus in Minor Feelings, Sejal Shah’s experiences in This Is One Way to Dance, and Jaswinder Bolina’s memories in Of Color, and my memories returned again, like Bishop’s moose, high as a church / homely as a house. While reading, I suddenly felt less ashamed, less alone, and less silent.
Maybe memories are not to be forgotten but also not exactly to be remembered. Maybe that glorious, lumbering moose that stops us for a moment isn’t death after all. Maybe it’s memory, which is the exit wound of joy.
<b>Praise for <i>Dear Memory</i></b><br /><br />"[<i>Dear Memory</i>] is an open-ended inquiry not of a bounded life but of an ongoing present, full of longing and imperfection . . . Chang has followed language to the edge of what she knows; the question her book asks is whether language can go further still . . . Her own project is not to erase those incisions—or even, as a child might hope, to heal them—but to retrace and redescribe them. If there are wounds in the past, she seeks to live with them as scars." <b><i>—New Yorker</i></b><p><br /></p><p>"Groundbreaking . . . Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." <b>—Thúy Dinh, NPR</b><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>"Chang's work is excavation, a digging through the muck of society for an existential clarity, a cultural clarity and a general clarity of self." <b>—<i>New York Times Book Review</i></b></p><p><br /></p><p>"Both a chronicling of [Chang's] family's history and a powerful, stirring rumination on ancestry, inherited trauma and home." <b>—<i>TIME Magazine</i>, "Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2021"</b></p><p><br /></p><p>"[<i>Dear Memory</i> is] a collage of fragments constituting a moving portrait of the poet herself." <b>—<i>Los Angeles Times</i>, "Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2021"</b></p><p><br /></p><p>"<i>Dear Memory</i> is the work of a gifted poet, a wordsmith who is conscious that absent a chance to be an eyewitness to the past, we are left to spin our own webs of emotional significance and nostalgia." <b>—Lorraine Berry, <i>Minneapolis Star Tribune</i></b></p><p><br /></p><p>"After the impressive formal innovations of her 2020 book, <i>OBIT</i>, which won multiple national awards, Chang continues to find new ways to plumb her experiences on the page . . . Depending on what one brings to this book, each reader may find their own moment of goosebumps or tears . . . This book is moving in a way that transcends story and message; it captures a pure sense of another person's heart." —<b><i>Kirkus Reviews</i>, Starred Review</b><br /><br />
"Chang has assembled a collection of letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as well as family memorabilia, creating not just a moving family history but a rumination on the creative and self-shaping act of remembering." —<b>Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"</b><br /><br />
"A moving consideration of ancestry and loss . . . [Chang's] prose is sharp and strong—memory is the 'exit wound of joy,' she writes—and her creativity shines in her incorporation of the collage-like visual elements, which add depth. Fans of Chang's poetry will be delighted." —<b><i>Publishers Weekly</i>, Starred Review</b><br /><br />"Ever inventive, ever searching, Chang bends genres to approach an unmanageable emotion." <b><i>—Observer</i></b></p><p><br /></p><p>"These letters to the past that are paving stones to the future is the verdant ground that Victoria Chang explores in these, dare I say, memorable essays." <b>—<i>Colorado Review</i></b></p><p><br /></p><p>“Victoria Chang's <i>Dear Memory</i> is a tender exploration of grief, an excavation into stories untold, memories unshared, the treasures that await our discoveries if we trace through the lives that held ours. It is a vulnerable and evocative experience of what it means to miss, to yearn, to return to the pieces of our most beloved." —Kao Kalia Yang</p><p><b><br /></b></p><p>
"Those who were fans of Chang's previous book, <i>Obit</i>, will find some similar (yet still refreshing) innovations of style and feeling in <i>Dear Memory</i>. In this genre-bending and deeply personal work, Chang manipulates the loose form of letter-writing to build an archive of emotion out of an archive of familial history. This collection takes seriously the literary value of non-traditional literary elements such as collage-making, snippets of memorabilia, drawings in journals, and bureaucratic debris. This work emphasizes that alongside her masterful and vulnerable writing, these are, in fact, the bits and pieces which have most tangibly shaped our history and experience. Her boundary-pushing exploration of herself is moving and intimate on levels beyond expectation. <i>Dear Memory</i> marks an important step in the evolution of Chang's work, and I look forward to seeing its impact unfold in the literary sphere." —<b>Mrittika Ghosh, Seminary Co-op Bookstore</b><br /><br />
"Victoria Chang's <i>Dear Memory</i> grapples with the nature of memory and how one bears the personal traumas of those who came before. Using a collection of ephemera left by her mother as a point of departure, the accomplished poet frames letters to intimates as a way to navigate her own grief and explore memories of what shaped her sense of self while growing up. While the papers left behind by Chang's mother are a record of past events, Chang's letters demonstrate how their effects continue to resonate—across time, oceans, and through generations. Imaginatively creating a conversation between past and present, Chang fills in gaps and asks what it means to truly know oneself through one's own history." —<b>Isa S. Politics & Prose</b><br /><br />
<b>Praise for Victoria Chang</b><br /><br />
“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.”—<b><i>The Millions</i></b><br /><br />
“Chang’s star is rising, and lucky for us, she writes with compassion, grace, and a true ethical sensibility.”—<b><i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i></b><br /><br />
“Many poets display a single strength. Some write beautiful nature poems, others write well about relationships, still others have a gift for addressing issues like politics or economics. Chang can do it all.”—<b><i>Kansas City Star</i></b><br /><br />
<b>Praise for <i>OBIT</i></b><br /><br />
<b>Finalist for the 2021 PEN / Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection</b><br />
<b>Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry</b><br />
<b>Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry</b><br /><br />
“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 emerges from these poems.”—<b><i>New York Times</i></b>, “100 Notable Books of 2020”<br /><br />
“Chang’s sharp crystallizations of the pain and disorientation of death, and the way it reverberates through life, bring us to the raw heart of grief without the overblown language of classical elegy. These are poems that reproduce the logic and feeling of loss—a gift for anyone who has struggled to find words to express grief.”—<b>NPR</b><br /><br />
“In [<i>OBIT</i>], mortality is not a before and after state, but rather a constantly shifting enigma.”—<b><i>New York Times Book Review</i></b><br /><br />
“Exceptional . . . Chang’s poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore.”—<b><i>Publishers Weekly</i> (starred review)</b><br /><br />
“Chang has created a unique poetic construct. . . . The feeling of hope is a theme throughout this solid collection, in variations Chang evokes with grace: ‘Hope / is the wildest bird, the one that flies / so fast it will either disappear or burst / into flames.’ Chang’s poetry fine tunes that conflagration with acuity.”—<b><i>Booklist</i></b><br /><br />
“[<b>OBIT</b>] marshals all the resources of poetry against the relentless emotional cascade that’s associated with death—and, very much to its credit, and as a testament to its success, the book has arrived at a kind of momentary stalemate against that cascade.”—<b><i>Rick Barot</i></b><br /><br />
“A long elegy for the poet’s mother, <i>OBIT</i> is the kind of poetry collection that creates a new genre. A reinvention of form? A symphony? A manifesto? All of the above and then some. It is heartbreaking and enthralling. It sings and instructs. It is a world all its own; one that changes ours.”—<b>Ilya Kaminsky</b><br /><br />
“Here we have unmitigated heartbreak—but heartbreak mercifully free of the usual ‘death etiquette’: platitudes of ‘after-lives’ or ‘better offs.’ Thus, Chang has created something powerful and unconventional. These poems are zinger curveballs, and often come from the graveyard’s left field.”—<b><i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i></b><br /><br />
“These obits are fearless. They are also specific and intimate. . . . The emotional power of Chang’s <i>OBIT</i> comes from the grace and honesty with which she turns this familiar form inside out to show us the private side of family, the knotting together of generations, the bewilderment of grief.”—<b><i>Ploughshares</i></b><br /><br />
<b>Praise for <i>Barbie Chang</i></b><br /><br />
“But [Chang’s readers] won’t be the only ones [who like Chang’s new work]—and not even they will expect Chang’s grander scope, her greater nuance, and her more generous attention to its characters’ adult lives. . . . Chang’s punctuation-free lines, like WS Merwin’s, invite overlapping readings and multiple syntax. Her pathos slows down for jokes, apercus, and hyper-contemporary puns. . . . Such invitations are hard to resist, and they ring.”—<b>Stephanie Burt, Academy of American Poets</b><br /><br />
“Chang entrances with wordplay, but the dance never feels hollow: this is performance with poetic soul. . . . Don’t miss the exquisitely crafted litany of linked poems in the middle of the book, evidence how quickly and precisely Chang can turn from comic to comforting to transcendent.”—<b><i>The Millions</i></b><br /><br />
“Chang is emerging as an exciting voice in contemporary poetry, and [<i>Barbie Chang</i>] is undoubtedly her most accomplished volume to date.”—<b><i>Publishers Weekly</i></b></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>
A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Los Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021
For poet Victoria Chang, memory “isn’t something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally.” It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.
Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.
In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.
Today I found a Certificate of Marriage and a translation of it by the President Translation Service. The date is July 26, 1939. Now I know your name: Miss Chang Chi-Yin. I also know you were 27 and Grandfather 26. I wonder if this was considered strange at the time, your being older than him.
I now know you were born on April 29, 1913. Seeing this date makes me cry. The tears are long and rusted. I have tried to tie them together into a long string toward your country. The farthest I’ve ever made it was Kansas. The tornadoes always break my tears.
Dear Grandmother, I now know you were born in Chingwan Hsien, Hopei Province. I google Hopei and see it is in the North of China, where all the good doughy food Mother used to make comes from—the bao zi, jiao zi, and shao bing. I can see how close you were to Beijing and Mongolia.
I learn that you were born one year after the Qing dynasty collapsed. I learn that you lived amid civil war. I wonder if this is why you took your children and left for Taiwan.
I can’t find your town, Chingwan Hsien, on Google because it’s probably spelled another way. After more searching, I figure out it is likely Jing Wan Xian. But I still can’t locate it on the map of Hopei, which I figure out is also Hebei Province.
The Certificate says you were united in matrimony at Chungking City, Szechuan Province. Google says there are thirty million people there. I try to imagine thirty million people who look like me. In that moment, grief freezes.
The Certificate says you were introduced to each other by Mr. Chang Kan-Chen and Mrs. Chou Chi-Ying. I wonder who these people were. I wonder if yours was an arranged marriage or if you loved each other. Or both. I wonder what love looked like in China in 1939.
The Certificate says: These two parties are now united forever in harmony on this auspicious day in taking an oath of mutual fidelity throughout their lives. What happened afterwards, I don’t know. I do know that when I met you, the one time I met you, you were no longer together and hadn’t been in a long time. But Mother never talked about that. Mother only ever bitterly talked about how you favored all of your sons.
The one time I met your former spouse, my grandfather, was when Mother brought me to the arcade to meet him. I played Ms. Pac-Man the whole time, while they stood near the door and talked. Their mouths moved but I couldn’t hear anything. All I remember is the sound of the yellow mouth eating white pellets.
I often think about what the poet Mary Jo Bang wrote about her dead son, What is elegy but the attempt/To rebreathe life/Into what the gone once was/Before he grew to enormity. That is what Mother feels like: an enormity. My history feels even larger. The size of atmosphere.
An elegy reflects on the loss of a loved one. What form can express the loss of something you never knew but knew existed? Lands you never knew? People? Can one experience such a loss? The last definition of absence is the nonexistence or lack of. See how the of hangs there like someone about to jump off a balcony?
I want to believe in the origin story. I want to believe we all desire to know how we came to be, who we came from. I want to know why my fingers are so long, why my mouth naturally frowns, why my back has chronic pain, why I have freckles all over my nose. Why my mind is so restless.
But what if, during her own migration, my mother’s memories migrated, too, and became exiled from their origins? What if both my origin and memory can never be pinned down?
Grandmother, in the list of people present during your marriage, there were two matchmakers, three parents, and a witness. Where was the fourth parent? I now know the names of three of my ancestors: Jin Hsuan-San, Chang Yen-Chen, Pi Pao-Chuan. I also have a photocopy of the original marriage certificate in Chinese. I now know your names in Chinese characters, though I can’t read them well.
My mother had a photocopy of each of these documents. And then she made another copy of the copies. So many copies to forget her past. If I throw them away, does that mean I was never born? In some ways, being born Chinese in America means not being born at all.
Maybe all of our memories are tied to the memories of others. Maybe my memories are tied to Mother’s memories, and Mother’s memories are like objects in a mirror—I see them, but I can’t ever reach them. When Mother died, my exile detached from her exile, and that gap filled with longing.
But with these papers, there’s now a new wind. A Mongolian wind from the North, one I have never smelled before. A new feeling that I, too, come from something, from some people, from somewhere.
***
Dear D,
Do you remember those Fridays in gym class when Ms. A made us jog around the field behind the school? Did you know they tore down the school a few years ago? The school is charred, but the field isn’t. The field is still there. The field foiled the trucks. The field won. My shadow is still in that field, attached to your shadow.
Do you remember how you used to run after me shouting you’re so ugly! How you would be in front of me, turn around and face me, jog backwards and laugh, Why are you so ugly? I yelled back at you with silence.
Dear D, I doubt you remember the fields, but the fields remember. I’ve wanted so many times to return to that field, to hear the grasses tell me what they heard.
Sometimes I wonder if you chased me one time or many times. I wonder how memory can become larger and larger. Does it matter whether you were wearing shorts or not? Whether the shorts had a stripe down each side? I imagine you had tube socks on. I imagine they had blue stripes. Sometimes I think of H, who once threw an icy snowball at my face. Did he do that once or every winter? And M, whenever we were alone, telling me to go back to China.
Sometimes I think about the styles of these bullies—some preferred to work alone, some needed an audience. But all of them had eyes that singed.
We often speak of memory as something that lingers, that returns again and again. Maybe memory is more like a homicide, each time it returns, it’s a new memory, one that has murdered all the memories before.
Last night, we were driving in a car in Montana, a scientist and two poets. The scientist turned off the headlights by accident. All went black. And it was beautiful. For a moment, even trauma was gone. And then he found the switch, the lights came back on, and we were again driving underneath the fog, and all of my memories returned.
In that moment, in the darkness, it felt like I had seen Elizabeth Bishop’s moose:
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church
homely as a house
. . .
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?
But in fact, I had seen nothing. In darkness, my body had emptied of all memories. In that moment, nothing had shape. Maybe Bishop’s moose is death.
Dear D, a while back, I found you on Facebook. I saw two children with curly brown hair. You, like me, must teach your children how to be kind. You looked fit, like a runner. I imagined you running backward again. Step by step, able to shout and laugh at once, a small crowd gathering around you, all the same kids who are friends with me on Facebook now. How they looked on, some laughed.
Sarah was the only one who said anything. When she saw me crying in the locker room, she stopped, asked me if I was okay. Recently, Sarah messaged me and seemed to feel relief that I was still alive. Her concern startled me, as I had spent decades forgetting those early years, telling every new person I met that I had a great childhood. Because I had no history, history could be made, like a painting.
D, I wanted to send you a message and tell you about all the years your face stayed in my body, how you were that fog in Montana. Instead, I silently scrolled through your photos and looked at one where you stood next to Nina at a reunion and had captioned it the one that got away.
Sometimes I think I was the one who got away. From you, those kids, that quiet street on Langlewood Drive in Michigan. But then the fog. There’s an eye in the middle of that fog.
In truth, I am ashamed to write this, to still think about the past, to still have these memories. I wonder if I am ashamed of the memories, the events, or myself. That fundamentally there was something wrong with me, my family, my countries I never knew.
Recently, in her book, All You Will Ever Know, I read about Nicole Chung’s experiences being bullied in a mostly white town, Cathy Park Hong’s experiences being mocked on a school bus in Minor Feelings, Sejal Shah’s experiences in This Is One Way to Dance, and Jaswinder Bolina’s memories in Of Color, and my memories returned again, like Bishop’s moose, high as a church / homely as a house. While reading, I suddenly felt less ashamed, less alone, and less silent.
Maybe memories are not to be forgotten but also not exactly to be remembered. Maybe that glorious, lumbering moose that stops us for a moment isn’t death after all. Maybe it’s memory, which is the exit wound of joy.