RaveBook Post\'I want to complain to the boss of God about God,\' writes Victoria Chang. \'What if the boss of God is rain, and the only way to speak to rain is to open your mouth to the sky and drown?\' In no regular way a reader of poetry, I was brought to Obit, her most recent book of poems, by my love for this image of shouting mutely into the sky. I feel it in my body in a time when it is hard to feel anything. The book, thin with wide margins and heavy as lead, is a collection of losses: a father, aphasic after a stroke, a mother’s death from pulmonary fibrosis. A collection of poems in the form of dozens of obituaries, for parents, for selves, for language, Obit is easily the most apt and soothing (soothing like chopping wood, like carrying water or yelling into a well) work I have read since before the world upended ... Chang’s poems provoke a needed catharsis ... There is no way around the work of grief. The place where it leaves you is good.
