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Obit
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.
113 pages, Paperback
First published April 7, 2020
289 people are currently reading
9886 people want to read
About the author
Victoria Chang
29 books410 followersVictoria Chang's latest book of poems is With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Corsair in the UK), which received the Forward Prize in Poetry for the Best Collection. Her most recent book is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her prose book, Dear Memory, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. Her recent book of poems, OBIT, was published in 2020 by Copper Canyon Press. 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 is the Bourne Chair of Poetry and the Director of Poetry@Tech at Georgia Tech.
Her website is www.victoriachangpoet.com. Twitter: @VChangPoet.
Her website is www.victoriachangpoet.com. Twitter: @VChangPoet.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 722 reviews
January 4, 2021
Time magazine wrote a beautiful description of this book—
It expresses ‘Obit’ better than I ever could for this compassionate and genre-defying powerful distillation of the experience of understanding and acceptance; of triumph over death—over grief.
‘Obit’ is stunningly powerful—gorgeous—
masterfully thought provoking-deeply reflective—emotional—
with writing that could have only come from one’s most honest core of the soul’s truth. ...
.....as Victoria Chang finds solace and hope through her very unique ways of mourning.
From Time magazine:
“When you lose someone you love, the world doesn’t stop to let your 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 proceeded 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”.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book about ‘the experience’ of loss more profoundly- through words- through language-that speaks the most absolute truth—
in ways my ‘gut’ has always known myself —
but I just never had the awareness—to express them.
As sad as this book is—what’s amazing is how satisfying ‘Obit’ also is —somebody finally came along ( thank you Victoria Chang)....that showed us, teaches us - explains how our cells move, how our blood moves, our our planet rotates,
how there is always an unspoken language beneath the surface of the language we share with others—with ourselves....
The blinders have been lifted —every person who reads ‘Obit’ will look at truths which YOU KNEW- but.....
DIDN’T consciously know.
Excerpt:
“The future can be thrown away by the privileged. But sometimes she just suddenly dies. The way the second person dies when a mother dies, reborn as third person ‘as my mother’. The way grief is really about future absence. The way the future closes its offices when a mother dies. What’s left: a hole in the ground the size of violence”.
Excerpt:
“When my mother died, I saw myself in the mirror, her words around my mouth, like powder from a donut. Her last words were in English. She asked for a Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese. I wonder what her last thought was. I used to think that a dead person‘s words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to like a scent. My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl. I passed the tree each spring. I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves”.
“I Love so many things I have never touched: the moon, a shiver, my mothers heart”.
So many things —orbiting around our immediate gut-wrenching loss when a person dies we love more than words can ever express—optimism, civility, logic, friendships, ambition, language, approval, secrets, music, appetite, reasons, affection, home, empathy, time.... and many - many more things die....
But....
“Blame— wants to die but cannot. It’s hair is untidy but it’s always here”.
“Guilt—never died on August 3, 2017. I hired a hit man to use a missile. But guilt still lies in a heap on my chest at night like a pile of frozen pigeons”.
These stories, and poetry are stunning. I don’t think I’ve ever read a collection better.
Timely - deeply personal - yet universal!!
It expresses ‘Obit’ better than I ever could for this compassionate and genre-defying powerful distillation of the experience of understanding and acceptance; of triumph over death—over grief.
‘Obit’ is stunningly powerful—gorgeous—
masterfully thought provoking-deeply reflective—emotional—
with writing that could have only come from one’s most honest core of the soul’s truth. ...
.....as Victoria Chang finds solace and hope through her very unique ways of mourning.
From Time magazine:
“When you lose someone you love, the world doesn’t stop to let your 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 proceeded 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”.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book about ‘the experience’ of loss more profoundly- through words- through language-that speaks the most absolute truth—
in ways my ‘gut’ has always known myself —
but I just never had the awareness—to express them.
As sad as this book is—what’s amazing is how satisfying ‘Obit’ also is —somebody finally came along ( thank you Victoria Chang)....that showed us, teaches us - explains how our cells move, how our blood moves, our our planet rotates,
how there is always an unspoken language beneath the surface of the language we share with others—with ourselves....
The blinders have been lifted —every person who reads ‘Obit’ will look at truths which YOU KNEW- but.....
DIDN’T consciously know.
Excerpt:
“The future can be thrown away by the privileged. But sometimes she just suddenly dies. The way the second person dies when a mother dies, reborn as third person ‘as my mother’. The way grief is really about future absence. The way the future closes its offices when a mother dies. What’s left: a hole in the ground the size of violence”.
Excerpt:
“When my mother died, I saw myself in the mirror, her words around my mouth, like powder from a donut. Her last words were in English. She asked for a Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese. I wonder what her last thought was. I used to think that a dead person‘s words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to like a scent. My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl. I passed the tree each spring. I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves”.
“I Love so many things I have never touched: the moon, a shiver, my mothers heart”.
So many things —orbiting around our immediate gut-wrenching loss when a person dies we love more than words can ever express—optimism, civility, logic, friendships, ambition, language, approval, secrets, music, appetite, reasons, affection, home, empathy, time.... and many - many more things die....
But....
“Blame— wants to die but cannot. It’s hair is untidy but it’s always here”.
“Guilt—never died on August 3, 2017. I hired a hit man to use a missile. But guilt still lies in a heap on my chest at night like a pile of frozen pigeons”.
These stories, and poetry are stunning. I don’t think I’ve ever read a collection better.
Timely - deeply personal - yet universal!!
May 24, 2021
Language is a slippery beast. If I wrote this review tomorrow, I’d forget what I was going to say, at least partially, and write something different. Clichés have staying power because they are true, in a neutered and general manner. They give us a common language to resort to. We all want to live, laugh, and love. Do we want what those three words have come to represent, listed in that order? Probably not.
So how do we talk about grief and sadness, emotions that would rather burrow deep in our gut than in tidy little packets of words? Victoria Chang has seemingly found a way, writing obituaries for aspects of her parents—friendship, optimism, hope, etc—as she tracks her grieving, less a process and more an exploration.
I love how she examines death, even if her unflinching turns of phrase leave you no choice but to consider your own mortality. As language erodes we edge closer to death, our lack of communication isolating us, even our thoughts unable to capture base desires and needs. The mind betrays us long before death comes along. As our memories flee, the experiences that we’ve used to construct our flimsy sense of self dissipate, a death of the past to foreshadow the death in the future. As Chang asks, are we running towards death or away from it? A matter of perspective, I suppose, but the ending remains the same, and Chang has the courage to write out the miniscule deaths that all lead to our grand departure.
I have to admit I did not enjoy the long-form poem in the middle of the book, which was structurally adventurous and choppy to read (which may have been intentional). It seemed purposefully incomprehensible, perhaps falling into the imitative fallacy as it tried to capture the slipstream of grief, sadness, and isolation that defies typical mourning progressions.
This remains a tremendous read. It does what so little writing can do—that is, illuminate an aspect of myself that I was aware of but too content and afraid of to fully explore.
Listen to the full podcast at here.
So how do we talk about grief and sadness, emotions that would rather burrow deep in our gut than in tidy little packets of words? Victoria Chang has seemingly found a way, writing obituaries for aspects of her parents—friendship, optimism, hope, etc—as she tracks her grieving, less a process and more an exploration.
I love how she examines death, even if her unflinching turns of phrase leave you no choice but to consider your own mortality. As language erodes we edge closer to death, our lack of communication isolating us, even our thoughts unable to capture base desires and needs. The mind betrays us long before death comes along. As our memories flee, the experiences that we’ve used to construct our flimsy sense of self dissipate, a death of the past to foreshadow the death in the future. As Chang asks, are we running towards death or away from it? A matter of perspective, I suppose, but the ending remains the same, and Chang has the courage to write out the miniscule deaths that all lead to our grand departure.
I have to admit I did not enjoy the long-form poem in the middle of the book, which was structurally adventurous and choppy to read (which may have been intentional). It seemed purposefully incomprehensible, perhaps falling into the imitative fallacy as it tried to capture the slipstream of grief, sadness, and isolation that defies typical mourning progressions.
This remains a tremendous read. It does what so little writing can do—that is, illuminate an aspect of myself that I was aware of but too content and afraid of to fully explore.
Listen to the full podcast at here.
January 5, 2020
Obit is not a book to read in one sitting. It would be too hard on the heart, I think. Even reading this book over the course of several days, these anti-elegies in the face of reckless loss, constellated by tankas and a stream of sonnets flowing down the middle, these obits for teeth and affection, for guilt and time, for America and dresses, left me windless. Victoria Chang artfully tests the capacity of metaphor as she writes about her father's failing health, her mother's dying, the in-between, and the aftermath—how sometimes metaphor is the truest method for translating a feeling, an act, or a memory, and sometimes it is lacking, and even a total failure. In writing Obit, Chang said she was "trying to get as close to the bone of grief as possible." This book is the bone, and the knife that cut to the bone, too.
November 9, 2020
In her collection Obit, Victoria Chang takes the journalistic standard we call an obituary and puts it through some poetic paces. For most of the book, each poem looks like a column in a newspaper, forgoing stanzas for one tall rectangular block. And while the starting point may be the stroke and death of her father followed by the death of her mother, her poems take matters a step further.
How? The Table of Contents foreshadows how: Title-less poems commemorate her father’s frontal lobe, voice mail, language, the future, civility, privacy, her mother’s lungs, her mother’s teeth, friendships, gait, optimism, ambition, memory, tears, etc. Some of the poems are repeat-obits, including ones for Victoria Chang, the author herself, who feels beleaguered and fundamentally transformed by grief and its effects on who she is.
To give the reader occasional breathers, Chang includes a series of tankas throughout. Then there is Section II: “I Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue,” where she forsakes the middle tower spaces of the page used for obits and writes poems that expand to the entire page, using white spaces between single words or small clumps of words, forcing the reader to slow down and carefully pick through the wreckage death scatters like so much flotsam and jetsam.
For this to work (and it does), the poet has to be both confident (check) and accomplished (check) with personification. Let’s look, for instance, at Chang’s obituary for Approval:
Approval – died on August 3, 2015
at the age of 44. It died at 7:07 a.m.
How much money will you get was my
mother’s response to everything. She
used to wrap muffins in a napkin at
the buffet and put them in her purse.
I never saw the muffins again. What I
would do to see those muffins again,
the thin moist thread as she pulled the
muffin apart. A photo shows my mother
holding my hand. I was nine. I never
touched her hand again. Until the day
before she died. I love so many things I
have never touched: the moon, a shiver,
my mother’s heart. Her fingers felt like
rough branches covered with plastic. I
trimmed her nails one by one while the
morphine kept her asleep. Her nails
weren’t small moons or golden doors
to somewhere, but ten last words I was
cutting off.
As Chang writes obituaries for abstract things like approval, it gives her time to explore all the feelings that overwhelm her, first while her parents are ill and then while they die, not to mention her grief in the days and months after they die. In that sense, this collection is one long obituary for both her parents and the familiar way of life she had grown accustomed to, only broken down into the form of obituaries.
The form suits Chang’s talents well. It also challenges the reader to consider all the little “deaths” we experience in life, how they change us in big and small ways, and what we notice about them if we take a moment to try. People change, that’s well understood. But seen through this lens, we come to realize that change in life is nothing but a series of little deaths, some planned or expected, many more spontaneous and surprising. Like this book!
How? The Table of Contents foreshadows how: Title-less poems commemorate her father’s frontal lobe, voice mail, language, the future, civility, privacy, her mother’s lungs, her mother’s teeth, friendships, gait, optimism, ambition, memory, tears, etc. Some of the poems are repeat-obits, including ones for Victoria Chang, the author herself, who feels beleaguered and fundamentally transformed by grief and its effects on who she is.
To give the reader occasional breathers, Chang includes a series of tankas throughout. Then there is Section II: “I Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue,” where she forsakes the middle tower spaces of the page used for obits and writes poems that expand to the entire page, using white spaces between single words or small clumps of words, forcing the reader to slow down and carefully pick through the wreckage death scatters like so much flotsam and jetsam.
For this to work (and it does), the poet has to be both confident (check) and accomplished (check) with personification. Let’s look, for instance, at Chang’s obituary for Approval:
Approval – died on August 3, 2015
at the age of 44. It died at 7:07 a.m.
How much money will you get was my
mother’s response to everything. She
used to wrap muffins in a napkin at
the buffet and put them in her purse.
I never saw the muffins again. What I
would do to see those muffins again,
the thin moist thread as she pulled the
muffin apart. A photo shows my mother
holding my hand. I was nine. I never
touched her hand again. Until the day
before she died. I love so many things I
have never touched: the moon, a shiver,
my mother’s heart. Her fingers felt like
rough branches covered with plastic. I
trimmed her nails one by one while the
morphine kept her asleep. Her nails
weren’t small moons or golden doors
to somewhere, but ten last words I was
cutting off.
As Chang writes obituaries for abstract things like approval, it gives her time to explore all the feelings that overwhelm her, first while her parents are ill and then while they die, not to mention her grief in the days and months after they die. In that sense, this collection is one long obituary for both her parents and the familiar way of life she had grown accustomed to, only broken down into the form of obituaries.
The form suits Chang’s talents well. It also challenges the reader to consider all the little “deaths” we experience in life, how they change us in big and small ways, and what we notice about them if we take a moment to try. People change, that’s well understood. But seen through this lens, we come to realize that change in life is nothing but a series of little deaths, some planned or expected, many more spontaneous and surprising. Like this book!
November 26, 2020
“The way we assume all tears taste the same. The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular.”
November 7, 2020
I really enjoyed this poetry collection about dealing with her mother’s death and her father’s devastating stroke. They are mostly written in the form of obituaries to the people and things in her life that were irreparably changed by those two events.
Read
October 3, 2021There must be some way of drawing a picture so that it doesn’t become an elegy.
So beautiful, and so heartbreaking. The very configuration of these poems—obituaries to all the things that died when the author’s mother did interspersed with tankas about the relationship the author has with her own children—is brilliant. There were some aspects I didn’t love, but it feels weird to critique a writing style and say that it wasn’t for me when it’s not supposed to be meant for anyone or anything other than a pure expression of the author’s grief. But for all the metaphors I didn’t care about, there were twice as many lines that made me think, Oh.
:: content warnings :: parental death (from pulmonary fibrosis), depictions of grief, stroke and dementia, reference to school shootings
October 13, 2020
Really really enjoyed this collection. "When someone you love dies, everything dies," it says on the back cover. And Chang writes obituaries for everything that dies when she loses her parents, one to death, the other to dementia. The clock, optimism, the car, blame, secrets, and even Chang herself die. As she writes, "her imagination lived beyond that day though."
July 30, 2022
Siento que he leído algo hermoso, pero que no he podido llegar a entender del todo. La poesía no es lo que más me gusta del mundo, porque nunca llego a comprenderla del todo.
Aún así, creo que es algo profundo, personal, íntimo; algo que la autora ha tenido el valor de compartir.
Si le pongo un pero, además de que lo he leído en inglés, y que por ello ha sido más complicado de leer, es que la parte II del libro me ha parecido muy confusa, porque no he podido llegar a entender como se leía.
Aún así, creo que es algo profundo, personal, íntimo; algo que la autora ha tenido el valor de compartir.
Si le pongo un pero, además de que lo he leído en inglés, y que por ello ha sido más complicado de leer, es que la parte II del libro me ha parecido muy confusa, porque no he podido llegar a entender como se leía.
August 11, 2025
A lovely and deeply moving poetry collection surrounding grief’s overwhelming multitudes.
As the title suggests, more than a collection of poems, this book is a collection of short obituaries relating the (often symbolic) deaths of not only herself and her loved ones, but also the death of meaning attached to multiple feelings, objects and circumstances. More importantly it sheds a light on all the ways language fails to cope and dies a slow death.
It is not often that I connect with poetry, but these words hit me hard and I found myself reflecting upon my own unacknowledged losses.
Sadness is plural, grief is singular and part of the process of growing up is to deal with our own scattered griefs throughout life. I am ever so grateful for all the emotions brought to the surface.
As the title suggests, more than a collection of poems, this book is a collection of short obituaries relating the (often symbolic) deaths of not only herself and her loved ones, but also the death of meaning attached to multiple feelings, objects and circumstances. More importantly it sheds a light on all the ways language fails to cope and dies a slow death.
It is not often that I connect with poetry, but these words hit me hard and I found myself reflecting upon my own unacknowledged losses.
Sadness is plural, grief is singular and part of the process of growing up is to deal with our own scattered griefs throughout life. I am ever so grateful for all the emotions brought to the surface.
June 26, 2020
Read this book! OBIT is another stunning book from Victoria Chang. I found I needed to read it over a few days, as parts of the book brought me to near tears. I was moved and changed by these poems. I loved the formal variation in this book, and was surprised to find myself so drawn to the tankas that intersperse each section. Highly recommend both for those who read poetry regularly and those less familiar with the genre.
January 15, 2023
Ay cabrón.
July 28, 2024
Grief is wearing a dead person’s dress
forever.
I wish that everyone who was awed by Joan Dideon’s memoir of mourning would be required to submerge into these depths. Perhaps as Shaq Diesel once quipped, that’s apples and basketballs.
I thought often of Derrida while tunneling across this collection and then ultimately of Wallace Stevens.
forever.
I wish that everyone who was awed by Joan Dideon’s memoir of mourning would be required to submerge into these depths. Perhaps as Shaq Diesel once quipped, that’s apples and basketballs.
I thought often of Derrida while tunneling across this collection and then ultimately of Wallace Stevens.
January 2, 2020
I don’t know if I should have read this in the state that I’m in currently.
I don’t regret it however.
This is different from any other book of poetry I’ve read before and was handled and written in such a lovely way.
Death and grief is something that unfortunately we all have to deal with in our lifetimes and there’s no guide on how to navigate through it.
Obit reflects not just on the life of Victoria Chang’s mother but on her family and herself as well. The motions of illness, inner turmoil, and battling morality.
We read as she says farewell to her parents mindset, bodily control, the blue dress...They all have obituaries.
This was a somber yet uplifting read and one of my first favorites of 2020. The people we love may leave us but the memories of them always linger, I believe it’s up to us to decide how to handle that.
Thank you to Edelweiss and the publisher for this copy of my ARC.
I don’t regret it however.
This is different from any other book of poetry I’ve read before and was handled and written in such a lovely way.
Death and grief is something that unfortunately we all have to deal with in our lifetimes and there’s no guide on how to navigate through it.
Obit reflects not just on the life of Victoria Chang’s mother but on her family and herself as well. The motions of illness, inner turmoil, and battling morality.
We read as she says farewell to her parents mindset, bodily control, the blue dress...They all have obituaries.
This was a somber yet uplifting read and one of my first favorites of 2020. The people we love may leave us but the memories of them always linger, I believe it’s up to us to decide how to handle that.
Thank you to Edelweiss and the publisher for this copy of my ARC.
May 26, 2022
This is a heartbreaking collection of poems about the deaths of her parents, creatively told in the style of obituaries.
POPSUGAR Reading Challenge 2022: This book fulfills the "An Anisfield Book Award Winner" category.
POPSUGAR Reading Challenge 2022: This book fulfills the "An Anisfield Book Award Winner" category.
November 17, 2020
When I read about this book and bought it, I dreaded its sadness but was eager for the possibility of its empathy and companionship. My dad died 12 years ago of pulmonary fibrosis (as did Chang's mother), and my experience of his illness, and somehow slow but fast decline, and finally the grief of losing him to that suffocating disease changed me in more ways than I probably even know. My mom died in January of this year of pancreatic cancer even after being diagnosed very early and living for months on the hope and expectation for surgery that could possibly save her. The disease's swift and silent spread extinguished that hope, however, and my sister and I spent a month in hospital and hospice by her side, shepherding her toward her death. Some days I still have to remind myself that it really happened.
As difficult as Chang's book is to read at many points, especially having been through such similar loss recently, I felt like it was a dear friend I could lean into, who wholeheartedly understood my grief. Many of the obits of different parts of her life and identity resonated deep within my experience of heartache. The language is beautiful and haunting...Chang lays her emotions so unabashedly on each page. Her writing skill and her willing vulnerability have given me a warmth and comfort that I deeply need at this time in my life. I will return to the pages of this book again and again.
As difficult as Chang's book is to read at many points, especially having been through such similar loss recently, I felt like it was a dear friend I could lean into, who wholeheartedly understood my grief. Many of the obits of different parts of her life and identity resonated deep within my experience of heartache. The language is beautiful and haunting...Chang lays her emotions so unabashedly on each page. Her writing skill and her willing vulnerability have given me a warmth and comfort that I deeply need at this time in my life. I will return to the pages of this book again and again.
February 9, 2022
A collection of little waterfall poems about grief about the deaths of the poet’s parents, with little tanka poems after every five waterfall poems and a longer poem with spaced out words in the middle. The waterfall poems are little obituaries about all sorts of things and establish the form as a set of curiosities along a theme.
Very little of it “worked” for me, the long poem not at all and the shorter tanka poems just a little. The obits were most interesting when discussing the poet’s children. There’s some gratuitous sympathy shout outs irrelevant to the theme. The waterfall poems were more like short prose passages than poems. The whole thing would have been far more effective in a more traditional format. As it is the grief and story seems too disjointed. The parents seem so awful though and a lot of sympathy develops for the poet in having to deal with it all. What is most beautifully done is the final sense at the end that the poet has conveyed her feelings about the deaths of her parents in a sympathetic way.
There’s nothing in the style that would make me recommend it, although maybe those dealing with the loss of parents themselves may find more to relate to.
Very little of it “worked” for me, the long poem not at all and the shorter tanka poems just a little. The obits were most interesting when discussing the poet’s children. There’s some gratuitous sympathy shout outs irrelevant to the theme. The waterfall poems were more like short prose passages than poems. The whole thing would have been far more effective in a more traditional format. As it is the grief and story seems too disjointed. The parents seem so awful though and a lot of sympathy develops for the poet in having to deal with it all. What is most beautifully done is the final sense at the end that the poet has conveyed her feelings about the deaths of her parents in a sympathetic way.
There’s nothing in the style that would make me recommend it, although maybe those dealing with the loss of parents themselves may find more to relate to.
December 11, 2024
do not read if you experience your parents aging for the first time in your life.
November 14, 2020
a word of advice—do read this, but read it slowly. fight the urge to read the book quickly, because it’s so intense. i’ve spent a lot of this year grieving. grieving the loss of people who I held close to my heart, the extra grief in knowing that those fallouts with those loved ones would have probably been preventable if the both of us were equally commited to generative conflict, the grief of immense and preventable loss to this pandemic, the grief of what we thought this world and year would be like.
both of my parents are alive; and these poems remind me that grief and love are siblings. grief is an emotion that we all will eventually carry, and oftentimes in much more similar ways than we think. i’m glad I bought and read this book.
both of my parents are alive; and these poems remind me that grief and love are siblings. grief is an emotion that we all will eventually carry, and oftentimes in much more similar ways than we think. i’m glad I bought and read this book.
August 13, 2020
This book is as good as everyone says it is.
Every page has a line or two or ten that quickens the pulse, that wakes you up, that reminds you why you read poetry.
It’s hard to describe how wise this book is. How insightful in the face of overwhelming emotion. How much it knows about language.
Every page has a line or two or ten that quickens the pulse, that wakes you up, that reminds you why you read poetry.
It’s hard to describe how wise this book is. How insightful in the face of overwhelming emotion. How much it knows about language.
January 4, 2022
This review was shoddily typed in a rush after I finished the book, so forgive me if it seems unedited or messy. I felt compelled to write this after a friend quizzed me on my thoughts on Obit, and I couldn't quite articulate myself, so here I am trying to put evidence to my fuzzy feelings...
I picked this up after hearing Chang read at the Adroit Journal 10th Anniversary event on Zoom. Her readings were incredible -- I think they were from this book entirely -- and so I decided to commit to the whole work.
Well, how do I put this? I might start by saying that these poems are good "journal poems." If you read one or two, they're great. But in aggregate, certain patterns of writing stand out that became tiresome for me.
The poems are arranged in the form of newspaper obituaries, so justified type in narrow columns. The effect this has is that the enjambments fall somewhere between cosmetic and intentional. Unlike in a truly free-verse poem (or even a stricter form like a sonnet), where you understand that the poet has intentionally ended the line where it ends, the effect of these poems is to give you a sense that the line has just hit the end of the column and technically continues. The first few times, this is great -- it's novel and interesting, and you think about the tension between form and content, and form might be thought of as a kind of imprisonment or convention that actually muddies meaning (because you can't tell what the author MEANT to say). But after a while, whatever conceptual novelty is gained from this wears off, and you just have to experience the muddiness of the poems themselves. Are they prose poems? Are they just splashy prose? Maybe they're just prose? --Not to say that poems MUST have line breaks, but I felt lost as to how to read these. As a result, sometimes the enjambments would make me feel a certain way (surprised, or urgent, or betrayed even --) but I often felt alone and confused in that feeling, because I couldn't tell if I was SUPPOSED to feel that way, or it was just a side-effect of a form that was chosen. And one might argue that this experience itself was supposed to mimic the experience of grief, but for a book that was otherwise so meta and committed to linguistic abstraction (touching often on the distinction between the thing and a representation of a thing, for example), perhaps the writer should have brought the reader "into the fold" so to speak on these choices.
Another thing that kept coming up for me was Chang's unyielding inventiveness, which could become tiring. Take for example this set of lines: "Since [my mother's] death, America has died a / series of small deaths, each one less / precise than the next. My tears are / now shaped like hooks but my heart / is damp still. If it is lucky, it is in the / middle of its beats. The unlucky dead / children hold telegrams they must / hand to a woman at a desk."
The lines above are definitely surprising, not least because of the enjambment (again: accidental or intentional?) literally separating the object from the verb... or an article from its noun... these are STRONG enjambments. Like... "it is in the / middle " ???! That's a WILD enjambment! So, okay, you're committing to this intense enjambment, but to do it again, and again? As the images change and replace each other? I think the best way to describe how I felt after reading many of these poems was "novelty desensitization." Gestures that would have seemed huge for another poet were used and used over and over again... until they lost their force, and instead sometimes felt a bit cheap.
For example, take the above, and let's try to trace the meanings at play here. Chang starts by relating her mother's death to the many small deaths of America -- ok, great. We're making a reference perhaps to the political landscape around 2018, makes sense... then the next line says each death is less "precise than the next." What does that mean? I get a sense that this means the deaths are less possible to be pinpointed, perhaps it isn't exactly clear how the death happened, or whether it happened, but nonetheless it is felt. A kind of fuzzy, ambiguous small death of America. Ok. I'm holding on to that idea. Now her tears enter the picture, which makes sense, death and grief... but the tears are shaped like hooks. Okay, what does that mean? But the line has already moved on, and now it's about her heart being damp. And there's a "but" there, which implies that hook-like tears normally don't come with a damp heart? Maybe the implication is that tears that AREN'T hooks are liquid? But once they're hooks they shouldn't also get your heart damp? Assuming the tears are falling directly onto your heart? Then, "If it is lucky, it is in the / middle of its beats." I'm again not sure what "middle" means here. "Middle" like it's in the processing of beating (versus being dead?) or middle as in the middle of a rhythm, like beat 2 of a 4-beat bar? Then while I'm processing that, "unlucky dead children" suddenly appear in a narrative-like scene with some sort of morbid bureaucrat.
... etc. The above is what I might have said if I had been in a workshop with a poem like this. When there are so many semantic or imagistic or tonal changes, and choices that create urgency on the part of the reader, without any discipline as to what they mean or their overall impression, I get the sense that the words are being used primarily to create a feeling of surprise. This works for maybe a couple of poems, but as a guiding principle in an entire book, I need more.
Maybe said in another way, this was a clever book because it was able to perhaps hide these mechanisms under a cultural banner of meaning: the death of parents. We all understand that this is supposed to be meaningful, that grief is a difficult and intense personal journey, but I wonder how much of that gets projected into this book as a way to read meaning that hasn't carefully been constructed the way meaning NEEDS to be constructed in poems: word by word, and line by line?
Finally, I'll say this: this book has many wonderful moments. It was most effective for me when the individual poems were more disciplined in their subject matter, riffing inventively on one knot or theme (such as in my favorite, "The Clock -- died on June 24, 2009..." which traces the cognitive exercise of drawing a clock with the cognitive decline of a physicist on the radio who can no longer draw clocks... with the cognitive decline of her father and the relationship between that decline and his ability to understand representational art or objects). In those poems, because I can see the design holding, I can commit myself to the waves of novelty, holding on desperately to the boat of your craft.
I picked this up after hearing Chang read at the Adroit Journal 10th Anniversary event on Zoom. Her readings were incredible -- I think they were from this book entirely -- and so I decided to commit to the whole work.
Well, how do I put this? I might start by saying that these poems are good "journal poems." If you read one or two, they're great. But in aggregate, certain patterns of writing stand out that became tiresome for me.
The poems are arranged in the form of newspaper obituaries, so justified type in narrow columns. The effect this has is that the enjambments fall somewhere between cosmetic and intentional. Unlike in a truly free-verse poem (or even a stricter form like a sonnet), where you understand that the poet has intentionally ended the line where it ends, the effect of these poems is to give you a sense that the line has just hit the end of the column and technically continues. The first few times, this is great -- it's novel and interesting, and you think about the tension between form and content, and form might be thought of as a kind of imprisonment or convention that actually muddies meaning (because you can't tell what the author MEANT to say). But after a while, whatever conceptual novelty is gained from this wears off, and you just have to experience the muddiness of the poems themselves. Are they prose poems? Are they just splashy prose? Maybe they're just prose? --Not to say that poems MUST have line breaks, but I felt lost as to how to read these. As a result, sometimes the enjambments would make me feel a certain way (surprised, or urgent, or betrayed even --) but I often felt alone and confused in that feeling, because I couldn't tell if I was SUPPOSED to feel that way, or it was just a side-effect of a form that was chosen. And one might argue that this experience itself was supposed to mimic the experience of grief, but for a book that was otherwise so meta and committed to linguistic abstraction (touching often on the distinction between the thing and a representation of a thing, for example), perhaps the writer should have brought the reader "into the fold" so to speak on these choices.
Another thing that kept coming up for me was Chang's unyielding inventiveness, which could become tiring. Take for example this set of lines: "Since [my mother's] death, America has died a / series of small deaths, each one less / precise than the next. My tears are / now shaped like hooks but my heart / is damp still. If it is lucky, it is in the / middle of its beats. The unlucky dead / children hold telegrams they must / hand to a woman at a desk."
The lines above are definitely surprising, not least because of the enjambment (again: accidental or intentional?) literally separating the object from the verb... or an article from its noun... these are STRONG enjambments. Like... "it is in the / middle " ???! That's a WILD enjambment! So, okay, you're committing to this intense enjambment, but to do it again, and again? As the images change and replace each other? I think the best way to describe how I felt after reading many of these poems was "novelty desensitization." Gestures that would have seemed huge for another poet were used and used over and over again... until they lost their force, and instead sometimes felt a bit cheap.
For example, take the above, and let's try to trace the meanings at play here. Chang starts by relating her mother's death to the many small deaths of America -- ok, great. We're making a reference perhaps to the political landscape around 2018, makes sense... then the next line says each death is less "precise than the next." What does that mean? I get a sense that this means the deaths are less possible to be pinpointed, perhaps it isn't exactly clear how the death happened, or whether it happened, but nonetheless it is felt. A kind of fuzzy, ambiguous small death of America. Ok. I'm holding on to that idea. Now her tears enter the picture, which makes sense, death and grief... but the tears are shaped like hooks. Okay, what does that mean? But the line has already moved on, and now it's about her heart being damp. And there's a "but" there, which implies that hook-like tears normally don't come with a damp heart? Maybe the implication is that tears that AREN'T hooks are liquid? But once they're hooks they shouldn't also get your heart damp? Assuming the tears are falling directly onto your heart? Then, "If it is lucky, it is in the / middle of its beats." I'm again not sure what "middle" means here. "Middle" like it's in the processing of beating (versus being dead?) or middle as in the middle of a rhythm, like beat 2 of a 4-beat bar? Then while I'm processing that, "unlucky dead children" suddenly appear in a narrative-like scene with some sort of morbid bureaucrat.
... etc. The above is what I might have said if I had been in a workshop with a poem like this. When there are so many semantic or imagistic or tonal changes, and choices that create urgency on the part of the reader, without any discipline as to what they mean or their overall impression, I get the sense that the words are being used primarily to create a feeling of surprise. This works for maybe a couple of poems, but as a guiding principle in an entire book, I need more.
Maybe said in another way, this was a clever book because it was able to perhaps hide these mechanisms under a cultural banner of meaning: the death of parents. We all understand that this is supposed to be meaningful, that grief is a difficult and intense personal journey, but I wonder how much of that gets projected into this book as a way to read meaning that hasn't carefully been constructed the way meaning NEEDS to be constructed in poems: word by word, and line by line?
Finally, I'll say this: this book has many wonderful moments. It was most effective for me when the individual poems were more disciplined in their subject matter, riffing inventively on one knot or theme (such as in my favorite, "The Clock -- died on June 24, 2009..." which traces the cognitive exercise of drawing a clock with the cognitive decline of a physicist on the radio who can no longer draw clocks... with the cognitive decline of her father and the relationship between that decline and his ability to understand representational art or objects). In those poems, because I can see the design holding, I can commit myself to the waves of novelty, holding on desperately to the boat of your craft.
January 31, 2023
I've never read anything quite like Obit, but the way Victoria Chang slowly unraveled all of the tiny deaths that occur throughout a lifetime before someone actually dies was mesmerizing and devastating at the same time. It's a beautiful book — and one that'll surely make you want to call your loved ones immediately.
July 7, 2020
loved the tone of barbie chang, felt familiar (in a good way) here but applied to a diff stage of life. grief for ill/dying parents, but at a distance, not quite understanding the sadness, not quite understanding the parents + who they've become in their illness, how grief is about you more than it is about them, the guilt at that
some really challenging things about love/care and how hard those things are: "how we go in and out of caring about others"
some lovely stuff about memory/images and how deceptive they are: "the way memory is the ringing after a gunshot. the way we try to remember the gunshot but can't" (that said i think in some cases, there would be an extra line -- like the second sentence here feels a bit extraneous) (but in others, she would really land a line/ending and just let it ring: "but the plane with all the words is crossing the sky")
probably best in smaller doses bc the similar form and content throughout the book made some poems feel less impactful than when i'd read them standalone and they'd inspired me to get the book
still such a cool form
the poems that broke up the obits that were more about her relationship with her own children didn't really land for me, maybe bc i feel like big baby these days
some really challenging things about love/care and how hard those things are: "how we go in and out of caring about others"
some lovely stuff about memory/images and how deceptive they are: "the way memory is the ringing after a gunshot. the way we try to remember the gunshot but can't" (that said i think in some cases, there would be an extra line -- like the second sentence here feels a bit extraneous) (but in others, she would really land a line/ending and just let it ring: "but the plane with all the words is crossing the sky")
probably best in smaller doses bc the similar form and content throughout the book made some poems feel less impactful than when i'd read them standalone and they'd inspired me to get the book
still such a cool form
the poems that broke up the obits that were more about her relationship with her own children didn't really land for me, maybe bc i feel like big baby these days
July 28, 2020
This was not an easy book to read.
Obit is a deeply personal collection of poems written by Victoria Chang about her grief over her mother’s illness and subsequent death along with her father’s stroke and dementia. It’s moving and somber. I had planned on reading this in a single sitting, but had to put it down and walk away a few times before I could read further.
Told in the form of short obituaries, she tackles the way grief makes you feel, the struggle of taking care of aging and sick parents, explaining grief to your children, and so much more.
One of the reasons I struggled so much with this collection is due to the death of my own mother back in 2010. Even a decade later (which honestly feels unreal), the grief is still a raw wound. These poems opened that wound and made me feel some of the same pain I felt all those years ago.
There were a few poems in this collection that didn’t speak to me, but that’s true of any collection. It’s hard for me to recommend this collection to everyone because it is difficult. If you can handle it though, it’s a beautifully crafted and honest collection.
Obit is a deeply personal collection of poems written by Victoria Chang about her grief over her mother’s illness and subsequent death along with her father’s stroke and dementia. It’s moving and somber. I had planned on reading this in a single sitting, but had to put it down and walk away a few times before I could read further.
Told in the form of short obituaries, she tackles the way grief makes you feel, the struggle of taking care of aging and sick parents, explaining grief to your children, and so much more.
One of the reasons I struggled so much with this collection is due to the death of my own mother back in 2010. Even a decade later (which honestly feels unreal), the grief is still a raw wound. These poems opened that wound and made me feel some of the same pain I felt all those years ago.
There were a few poems in this collection that didn’t speak to me, but that’s true of any collection. It’s hard for me to recommend this collection to everyone because it is difficult. If you can handle it though, it’s a beautifully crafted and honest collection.
June 12, 2020
Interesting idea but it often feels watered down and like I'm being told what her experience feels like rather than actually feeling it. The form gets old really fast too. You're reading a bunch of fake obituaries after all. If you want a rawer/realer book on grief, read Colin Popes Why I Didn't Go to your Funeral or Jason Shinder's Stupid Hope. Sharon Olds writes a ton of great grief poems too. This isn't a bad book it just isn't wonderful.
July 7, 2020
I had to read this for a poetry workshop on memento mori I'm taking, and wow. Just wow. In Victoria Chang's Obit, the poet reimagines what an obituary is and interrogates their grief upon the death of their parents. The language is quite lyrical and personal, which I came to admire greatly by the time I finished reading. Deeply moving--I could not recommend it more.
July 16, 2022
People call books 'meditations' all too often but OBIT really is a sustained, kaleidoscopic meditation on grief, death, dying, love, and bereavement. It is beautiful and heartbreaking and frequently invokes vertigo and familiarity at the same time, which might be one of the most important purposes of poetry, at least for me.
December 26, 2020
In late November, Missing signs began appearing for an older Korean American woman around my neighborhood. She has Alzheimers, they read. She went missing around __ and ___, and was wearing a red sweater. I have been quarantining in the weeks since so I have been unable to follow up and see whether the posters have been taken down, but I think of her often, and thought of her as I began reading Victoria Chang's Obit.
In this collection of poetry, Chang captures her mourning and reflection in the wake of her mother's death and her father's ongoing struggle with dementia after a stroke. She writes obituaries to friendships, her father's frontal lobe, affection, and even herself, multiple times.
As a child, I used to read the obituaries at the back of a popular Canadian news magazine: I appreciated them because they did the difficult task of capturing the scope and scale of a lifetime, asking you to look beyond the date of the death to a whole, entire life. Chang, however, plays with this format and uses her obituaries to distill grief, mourning, sorrow (which seem endless in the wake of extreme loss) into one single day, one point in time.
"The Future--died on June 24, 2009," she writes. "Approval-- died on August 3, 2015 at the age of 44."
Through these small punctuations of time, Chang captures with aching sharpness the experience of watching her parents go through their extended illnesses. She lingers on many related themes, and she interrupts her obituaries with individual tankas and one longer, extended poem "I am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue." One of her most beautiful poems is the obituary she wrote for similes:
Similes-- died on August 3, 2015.
There was nothing like death, just
death. Nothing like grief, just grief.
How the shadow of a chain-link fence
can look like a fish's scales but never
be. Once my mother called late at
night because she was constipated
The streetlamps still looked like things
with their long arched arms. I sat on
her bed in the dark. The glow from the
bathroom light still like everything. I
filled and emptied the plastic sitz bath
that looked like something. Her two
elbows still able to make small bowls
on her knees. I gave her instructions
and said nothing more. If only words
could represent thought in the way a
microphone represents words.
I can only imagine the agony of that family that had to put up those signs around my neighborhood, how they lay sleepless over her absence, but also in how they have needed to watch what they love about their loved one slowly crystallize and become memories rather than present experiences-- how they can become things to mourn. I think too of my parents growing older and how one day I will not have any more time with them, and on those days of mourning, I know that I will at least have this collection to pick up again.
In this collection of poetry, Chang captures her mourning and reflection in the wake of her mother's death and her father's ongoing struggle with dementia after a stroke. She writes obituaries to friendships, her father's frontal lobe, affection, and even herself, multiple times.
As a child, I used to read the obituaries at the back of a popular Canadian news magazine: I appreciated them because they did the difficult task of capturing the scope and scale of a lifetime, asking you to look beyond the date of the death to a whole, entire life. Chang, however, plays with this format and uses her obituaries to distill grief, mourning, sorrow (which seem endless in the wake of extreme loss) into one single day, one point in time.
"The Future--died on June 24, 2009," she writes. "Approval-- died on August 3, 2015 at the age of 44."
Through these small punctuations of time, Chang captures with aching sharpness the experience of watching her parents go through their extended illnesses. She lingers on many related themes, and she interrupts her obituaries with individual tankas and one longer, extended poem "I am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue." One of her most beautiful poems is the obituary she wrote for similes:
Similes-- died on August 3, 2015.
There was nothing like death, just
death. Nothing like grief, just grief.
How the shadow of a chain-link fence
can look like a fish's scales but never
be. Once my mother called late at
night because she was constipated
The streetlamps still looked like things
with their long arched arms. I sat on
her bed in the dark. The glow from the
bathroom light still like everything. I
filled and emptied the plastic sitz bath
that looked like something. Her two
elbows still able to make small bowls
on her knees. I gave her instructions
and said nothing more. If only words
could represent thought in the way a
microphone represents words.
I can only imagine the agony of that family that had to put up those signs around my neighborhood, how they lay sleepless over her absence, but also in how they have needed to watch what they love about their loved one slowly crystallize and become memories rather than present experiences-- how they can become things to mourn. I think too of my parents growing older and how one day I will not have any more time with them, and on those days of mourning, I know that I will at least have this collection to pick up again.
May 5, 2020
Death is a serious topic to discuss. Writing about the death of a parent is equal parts difficult and a testimony of strength.
In 'Obit', Victoria Chang's poetry expressed the loss of her mother in stunning verse and imagery. The poems inside 'Obit' not only speak about the loss of Victoria's Chang's mother, but also about the loss of life as Chang knew it. Each poem marks a moment in life that gradually departed, marking a personal loss. 'Ambition', 'Memory', and 'Friendships' (among others), each have their own date as to when their presence in life gradually slipped away, leaving fragments of events, of experiences now confined to the past.
By providing a voice to these moments of loss, Victoria Chang imbues life. She describes the last moments with her mother with intensity. The gradual departures of her father's way of life are equally vocal and heartbreaking. She shares every time her parents' mental health and her daily way of life took a drastic turn. Instead of casting these events aside, Chang gives each moment the recognition it deserves.
While I enjoyed Victoria Chang's unflinching honesty about the loss of her mother, I understand that the topic of death is not a comfortable one to discuss. As a collection of poetry, 'Obit' is rich in imagery as it paints a personal picture of precious moments in life. Definitely give this book a chance if you enjoy reading pieces about the value of family, and how each aspect of life should be held close.
In 'Obit', Victoria Chang's poetry expressed the loss of her mother in stunning verse and imagery. The poems inside 'Obit' not only speak about the loss of Victoria's Chang's mother, but also about the loss of life as Chang knew it. Each poem marks a moment in life that gradually departed, marking a personal loss. 'Ambition', 'Memory', and 'Friendships' (among others), each have their own date as to when their presence in life gradually slipped away, leaving fragments of events, of experiences now confined to the past.
By providing a voice to these moments of loss, Victoria Chang imbues life. She describes the last moments with her mother with intensity. The gradual departures of her father's way of life are equally vocal and heartbreaking. She shares every time her parents' mental health and her daily way of life took a drastic turn. Instead of casting these events aside, Chang gives each moment the recognition it deserves.
While I enjoyed Victoria Chang's unflinching honesty about the loss of her mother, I understand that the topic of death is not a comfortable one to discuss. As a collection of poetry, 'Obit' is rich in imagery as it paints a personal picture of precious moments in life. Definitely give this book a chance if you enjoy reading pieces about the value of family, and how each aspect of life should be held close.
September 12, 2022
DEEP DEEP WATERS, absolutely unparalleled STOP BREATHING language that floods with awe, dis- and re-membering words haunting beings back, truant, fierce, electric, empathic, powerful and ever non-predictable in a structure inimitable and BRILLIANT in how to construct, deconstruct moments that time smokes into linguistic chopping! Am enamored and hope everyone reads Chang's poetry!
Here are some quotes:
"The way his fists stay shut, the way
his mind is always out of earshot. The
way his words abandon his mouth and
each day I pick them up, put them back
in, screw the lid on tighter."
"The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular."
"Her imagination lived beyond that day though.
It weighed two pounds and could be lifted like weights."
"His favorite was to write the world in black
and white and then watch people try
and read the words in color. Letters
used to skim my father's brain before
they let go. Now his words are blind.
Are pleated."
GET A COPY! TRULY EXCEPTIONAL! LOVE LOVE LOVE!
Here are some quotes:
"The way his fists stay shut, the way
his mind is always out of earshot. The
way his words abandon his mouth and
each day I pick them up, put them back
in, screw the lid on tighter."
"The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular."
"Her imagination lived beyond that day though.
It weighed two pounds and could be lifted like weights."
"His favorite was to write the world in black
and white and then watch people try
and read the words in color. Letters
used to skim my father's brain before
they let go. Now his words are blind.
Are pleated."
GET A COPY! TRULY EXCEPTIONAL! LOVE LOVE LOVE!
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