Carol Muske-Dukes Reviews Victoria Chang's Obit

Los Angeles Review of Books shares a review by Muske-Dukes that calls Chang's latest, "a book of poems that arrive in waves of grief, tidal but truncated verse paragraphs." More: 

Grief here slides at times into dark humor, revealing the expansiveness of the prose poem form. 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.

The casual abbreviation of the book’s title — refusing the lengthier “obituary” (along with other formal crepe-hanging) — is reaffirmed by the casual shock of the author’s face printed on the book’s front cover. In a Warhol-like series of faux “obits,” the reader reviews the same repeated portrait of “Victoria Chang,” the book’s author, “unknowingly dead,” flattened against a familiar newsprint background. These funny/sad reproductions of the fraction-of-an-inch “obit” (not elegy or eulogy) stand in for the fragmentary death notices of countless life stories, billed by the letter. Yet Chang gathers these fragments and their limitations — reanimating entire lives within the form.

The “unknowingness” of death itself underscores each poem in the book. We get it: all that is mortal dies. But in Chang’s Obit, death makes a vaster clean sweep — the “smaller deaths” attached to grief are inventoried. Rooms die, privacy dies, control, optimism, clothes, ocean, and friendships die. Memories die, along with memory itself. The author “dies” with each erasure of a once-vital life of a loved one. Many poems meditate painfully on a mother’s death, others on a father’s slow physical diminishment.

The following brilliant leap embodies all of this in a riff of non sequiturs: “Once my father erected a basketball net, mounted it onto a wooden pole from the lumberyard to save money. With each shot, the pole moved a little […] until I had to shoot from the side of the driveway. Now I avoid semicolons. I look for statues whose eyes don’t move with me.”

Continue reading at LARB.