Published in 2021
136 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 She lives in Los Angeles and is the Acting Program Chair of Antioch University’s MFA Program.
What is this book about?
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.
