Obit: Poems

by Victoria Chang

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 123
Rating:

Synopsis:

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.

Victoria Chang’s Obit is — unsurprisingly — all about grief and loss, and not just the moment of someone’s death but also the moments of decline before, and the moments going through and sorting their things after, and many in between. It all circles round the loss of her mother and her father’s stroke (which took away his ability to understand and produce orderly language), casting forward and backward in time to try to make sense of it all.

The prose-poem obits are the strongest part, and I really disliked the layout of the poems in… I think it was part two? Unreadable with the spacing provided (at least in the ebook, but that seemed to be image files of the printed book for those sections, so I don’t think it was ebook formatting messing things up). It didn’t all strike a chord with me, but as I lingered with it and watched Chang reckon with the messy nonsense of grief and the living after, there were definitely parts that stood out, like this bit:

 When I told my children, the three of us hugged in a circle, burst into tears. As if the tears were already there crying on their own and we, the newly bereaved, exploded into them.

Overall, not a personal favourite, but an interesting collection and one I enjoyed.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)