The Trees Witness Everything

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

In this brilliant new collection , Chang continues her exploration of memory and mourning. These are impeccable, precise poems, sometimes shocking and strange, but always startling in their ability to excise an utterance from the depths of grief and longing that is both painful and reverent . . . Chang's crystalline, controlled poems seem etched from deep experience, and move hauntingly between the living and the dead . . . their economy lends them both a sharp detail and a hallucinatory potential, traversing a staggering progress of thought and image across a small number of lines

In this collection, the constraints of the waka, a Japanese syllabic form, yield highly compressed, surreal meditations on time, desire, and the movements of the mind itself. Chang's poems . . . document a practice of sustained observation and imagination.

Elegant and reflective . . . For those who are grieving and those who have grieved, Chang offers beautiful insights, and a path toward healing

Some of the most dazzling evocations of the natural world I've encountered

Sad, elegiac and intensely vivid

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.