Obit

Product Description

Los Angeles Times Book Prize
PEN Voelcker Award
Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize
The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020
Time Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020
NPR’s Best Books of 2020
National Book Award in Poetry, Longlist
National Book Critics Circle, Finalist
Griffin Poetry Prize, Shortlist
Frank Sanchez Book Award

After 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. In Obit, Chang writes of “the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.” 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. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses 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.”When you lose someone you love, the world doesn’t stop to let you mourn. Nor does it allow you to linger as you learn to live with a gaping hole in your heart. Indeed, this daily indifference to being left behind epitomizes the unique pain of grieving. Victoria Chang captures this visceral, heart-stopping ache in Obit, the book of poetry she wrote after the death of her mother. Although Chang initially balked at writing an obituary, she soon found herself writing eulogies for the small losses that preceded and followed her mother’s death, each one an ode to her mother’s life and influence. Chang also thoughtfully examines how she will be remembered by her own children in time.”―Time Magazine

Review

“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.” ―
The New York Times, “100 Notable Books of 2020”

“In [
Obit], mortality is not a before and after state, but rather a constantly shifting enigma…” ―
The 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’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

“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

“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

“Here we have unmitigated heartbreak―but heartbreak mercifully free of the usual ‘death etiquette’: platitudes of ‘after-lives’ or ‘better offs.’ Thus, Victoria 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… Th