PositiveBookPostPainfully bleak; it is not a triumph, it does not make meaning of these losses, though neither does it write them off as senseless ... While respecting the unknowability of her sons’ suffering and their separate decisions to end their lives, Li shows no acceptance toward the world itself, and least of all does she accept the failures of regular
people, the inane ways most of us respond to tragedy, loss, and the
suffering of others ... The book, as Li promises us at the start, offers no consolations. ... Li recounts these
self-destroying events at arms’ length, and what you feel most is the
distance ... The only comfort to be found
at all comes from resignation: there is no way out of life but through.
Victoria Chang
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.
