Obit

by Victoria Chang

Paperback, 2020

Call number

811 CHA

Collections

Publication

Copper Canyon Press (2020), 120 pages

Description

"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"--

User reviews

LibraryThing member Dreesie
National Book Award for Poetry 2020 longlist

The best book about grief I have read. After the death of her mother, Chang began writing "obits" of different aspects of her mothers--and then her father's--lives. Her mother suffered from and died of lung disease, her father of stroke complications.
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Optimism, caretakers, language, memory, the priest, the car, she herself--all receive obituaries (some multiples) written in this style.

It is clever, but it is also very real and very sad.
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LibraryThing member akblanchard
I don't read much modern poetry, but I picked up this collection because I was intrigued by its premise. Poet Victoria Chang writes about the deaths of her parents in many poems that take on the formal attributes of old-fashioned newspaper obituaries. I found the "obit" poems the most accessible
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and moving. Other poems focus on words and phrases connected only by spaces. These didn't work as well for me, perhaps because I was unsure how to interpret them.

All in all, this is a noteworthy collection that touches upon dementia, loss, and grief.
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LibraryThing member greeniezona
This book was recommended to me by Book Riot's Tailored Book Recommendation service. It was an excellent if uncomfortable read. A collection of obituaries to all the big and little losses after the author's mother dies, and her father experiences a series of strokes. Such a complicated rendering of
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grief.
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LibraryThing member bmanglass
I didn't dislike this, just not the right time for me to sit down with it and get through it all.

Awards

National Book Award (Longlist — Poetry — 2020)
LA Times Book Prize (Finalist — Poetry — 2020)
National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist — Poetry — 2020)
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (Poetry — 2021)

ISBN

1556595743 / 9781556595745
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