Obit

The breakout collection about grief, loss and living from award-winning Asian American poet Victoria Chang, whose star is rising.

'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'

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

Exceptional . . . Chang's poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore

These are poems that reproduce the logic and feeling of loss?a gift for anyone who has struggled to find words to express grief

[ Obit ] is heartbreaking and enthralling. It sings and instructs. It is a world all its own

Victoria Chang has created something powerful and unconventional. These poems are zinger curveballs

Chang has created a unique poetic construct . . . The feeling of hope is a theme throughout this solid collection, in variations Chang evokes with grace

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

Each poem is a masterwork of compression and compassion

Victoria Chang's latest book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything . Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory , was published in 2021 . OBIT, her prior book of poems was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Must-Read Book, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also longlisted for a National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and lives in Los Angeles and is a faculty member within Antioch's low-residency MFA Program.