Overview

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 A collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations. 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.

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9781571313928

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Reviews

Praise for Dear Memory Those who were fans of Chang's previous book, Obit, will find some similar (yet still refreshing) innovations of style and feeling in Dear Memory. 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. Dear Memory marks an important step in the evolution of Chang's work, and I look forward to seeing its impact unfold in the literary sphere. -Mrittika Ghosh, Seminary Co-op Bookstore Praise for Victoria Chang 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 Chang's star is rising, and lucky for us, she writes with compassion, grace, and a true ethical sensibility. -Los Angeles Review of Books 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. -Kansas City Star Praise for OBIT Finalist for the 2021 PEN / Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry 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. -New York Times, 100 Notable Books of 2020 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. -NPR In [OBIT], mortality is not a before and after state, but rather a constantly shifting enigma. -New York Times Book Review Exceptional . . . Chang's poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore. -Publishers Weekly (starred review) 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. -Booklist [OBIT] 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. -Rick Barot A long elegy for the poet's mother, OBIT 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. -Ilya Kaminsky 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. -Los Angeles Review of Books These obits are fearless. They are also specific and intimate. . . . The emotional power of Chang's OBIT 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. -Ploughshares Praise for Barbie Chang 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. -Stephanie Burt, Academy of American Poets 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. -The Millions Chang is emerging as an exciting voice in contemporary poetry, and [Barbie Chang] is undoubtedly her most accomplished volume to date. -Publishers Weekly

Praise for Victoria Chang 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 Chang's star is rising, and lucky for us, she writes with compassion, grace, and a true ethical sensibility. -Los Angeles Review of Books 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. -Kansas City Star Praise for OBIT Finalist for the 2021 PEN / Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry 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. -New York Times, 100 Notable Books of 2020 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. -NPR In [OBIT], mortality is not a before and after state, but rather a constantly shifting enigma. -New York Times Book Review Exceptional . . . Chang's poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore. -Publishers Weekly (starred review) 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. -Booklist [OBIT] 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. -Rick Barot A long elegy for the poet's mother, OBIT 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. -Ilya Kaminsky 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. -Los Angeles Review of Books These obits are fearless. They are also specific and intimate. . . . The emotional power of Chang's OBIT 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. -Ploughshares Praise for Barbie Chang 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. -Stephanie Burt, Academy of American Poets 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. -The Millions Chang is emerging as an exciting voice in contemporary poetry, and [Barbie Chang] is undoubtedly her most accomplished volume to date. -Publishers Weekly

Author Information

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.

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