Bøker av Victoria Chang

New collection from award-winning poet Victoria Chang, written in response to the work of the celebrated US artist Agnes Martin; the collection also includes some of Victoria's original art.

A new collection of poetry inspired by the work of Agnes Martin, exploring topics of feminism, art, depression, and grief, by the author of the prizewinning collection Obit. Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square.With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang's new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.

After her mother's death, Chang wrote deep into grief by composing "obits"-from her mother's blue dress to language itself.

Barbie's cultural artifice is unmasked by Victoria Chang's imagination, lifting the struggle of Asian American experience to mythic levels.

Chang's most recent book, Obit,was one of the most celebrated poetry books of 2020 Obit won the 2020 Pen/Voelcker Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was longlisted for the National Book Award Obit and this new book, The Trees Witness Everythingare related in that Chang was writing both simultaneously. Chang books have been named to the New York Times Notable Books List twice. Central themes are nature and human activity Inspired by the work of W.S. Merwin

The forthcoming title from award-winning Asian American poet Victoria Chang, whose star is rising.

Los Angeles Times Book PrizePEN Voelcker AwardAnisfield-Wolf Book PrizeNew York Times 100 Notable BooksTime Magazine's 100 Must-Read BooksNPR's Best BooksNational Book Award in Poetry, LonglistNational Book Critics Circle, FinalistGriffin Poetry Prize, ShortlistFrank Sanchez Book AwardAfter 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, "e;100 Notable Books of 2020"e;'Exceptional... Chang's poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore' Publishers Weekly

A collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.For poet Victoria Chang, memory "e;isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally."e; 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.

Circle adopts the shape as a trope for gender, family, and history. These lyrical, narrative, and hybrid poems trace the spiral trajectory of womanhood and growth and plot the progression of self as it ebbs away from and returns to its roots in an Asian American family and context.