Published in 2022
144 pages
Victoria Chang‘s books of poems, With My Back to the World, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2024. Her most recent book is The Trees Witness Everything. Her prose book, Dear Memory, was published in 2021. Her recent book of poems, OBIT, was published in 2020. It was named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a TIME, NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, Book of the Year. It received the LA Times Book Prize, the PEN Voelcker Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the NBCC, and long listed for the NBA. She lives in Los Angeles and is the Acting Program Chair of Antioch University’s MFA Program.
What is this book about?
In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” each poem is shaped by pattern and count. This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name―with reverence, economy, and whimsy―the ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.
