... remarkable ... these obits take the genre in an entirely new direction—Chang inverts the impersonal third person perspective, creating a reliable/unreliable first-person speaker who mourns and commemorates the death of a variety of ideas, objects, emotions, and people ... We know we are in the hands of a master. Restrictions in form can often lead to aesthetic and thematic liberation, and I was wholly engrossed by how much Chang accomplishes within the confines of the obituary’s obituary-ness—whether it’s the intense justified verticality to the use of dates, to the mix of objective and subjective intelligence ... That these poems do such complete work with so few tools from the poetry toolbox is humbling. Each poem is a masterwork of compression and compassion ... One of the many marvelous accomplishments of this book is how Chang makes private mourning and public mourning part of the same process.
Obit...is a book of poems that arrive in waves of grief, tidal but truncated verse paragraphs. 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' ... 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 ... The poet’s imagination and its pained empathy indeed 'live beyond' as it continues to record and reimagine death after death, long after her own 'loss' has occurred.
Within the rigid perimeters of these poems, Chang discusses the way grief robs us of form ... Whereas time undergoes fundamental changes, Chang points to how language simply collapses under the weight of this new world ... But for all the failures of language, Chang’s employment of it is beautiful and resonant ... Obit, independent of whether Chang feels she has 'successfully' described how it feels to grieve, ultimately provides nourishment[.]
How a person becomes a corpse, emptied of identity and meaning, is what Chang pursues relentlessly in this book—and how the living respond to this transmutation, both within ourselves and through social practice ... Depicting her mother becomes a task to attempt and fail at, again and again, in order to keep the memory of her close ... The simplicity of Chang’s diction and syntax is a careful misdirection. What seems like strict description is filled with meaning ... While the nuance of language and its common assumptions comprise one tether of this book, nature is another — as with the bud’s journey towards flowering, towards death. Rain, fruit, wind, trees, all return as images, again and again, to try to provide insight into what grief means ... There is an intimacy through something you can see, but never touch ... Thus a more complicated intimacy, defined by remote yet fixed positions, takes shape. Love exists, even at a distance, even with its flaws.
Although these epiphanies are often cryptic and abstract, they provide glimpses into Chang’s own process of reckoning with the onslaught of deaths that occur concurrently with the death of her mother. Each obituary also pushes the reader further and further into Chang’s poetic grief, though we’re given an occasional moment to catch our breath with the sporadic insertion of a tanka ... These interruptions often dwell on Chang’s children, offering both her and the reader the potential of life amidst the assurance of death ... Obit’s most trenchant moments arise out of this realization that 'all you have left is tone,' and for Chang, the tone is often raw anger ... what lingers are glimpses of hope, of Chang’s dry and piercing humor. Left in my mind are the fleeting 'framed photos' of care that Chang distills, small moments ... they capture the tone of these obituaries, where grief is tended to and given space.
... a stoic and complex expression of that polymorphous thing, grief ... In Chang’s telling, grief shoots off in all directions, killing off dozens of other things: appetite, blame, the deceased’s old clothes. Chang sets out to catalogue them all, and does so with rangy metaphysical imagination and terse precision ... She is devastating on how languages, and different ways of expressing affection, get lost in translation ... The collection is punctuated by poems about parenting, and in particular about the difficulties of parenting for someone who has recently lost a parent. Many of these parenting poems are tankas; they are weaker than the obituaries, their imagery too affectedly concise and platitudinous. But they do not destabilize the near-perfect balance of this solemn, gorgeous, understated book.
Chang’s obits, though, come as if from a parallel universe of obituaries, with different rules about what obits can say and how they can say it. Newspaper obits tend to linearity and coherence, for instance, hoping to convince us that our lives make a nice, consistent package; Chang’s are as quicksilver as memory in their leaps and landings ... These obits are fearless. They are also specific and intimate ... I should mention what they gain by being together. For one thing, the dates acquire new significance—not that the poems are in chronological sequence, but readers can notice recurrences and patterns, the clusters of poems around certain dates, intuit a kind of narrative ... The emotional power of Chang’s Obits comes from the grace and honesty with which she turns this familiar form inside out to show us the private side of family, the knotting together of generations, the bewilderment of grief.
These poems’ generous, meticulous record of grieving is inseparable from Chang’s retooling of poetic form and language ... The stalemate between words and the ineffable is at no point fully resolved in Obit. Chang is too honest a writer to declare a false victory, and the real fascination of this book is in slight shifts that tip the contest first one way, then another. The smallest components of language are examined for how they make and unmake meaning ... As a lyrical case study of a person coming to accept the hard terms of such love, Obit offers both instruction and solace.
'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.
At times, it becomes a hodgepodge but is also rich with beautiful lines that connect readers to emotion. A series of tanka about parenting become side notes to the narrative flow and are, on the whole, less effective ... Often incorporating short declarative sentences, Chang’s poems can veer toward being list-like but move forward quickly to endings that surprise and even amaze as they burrow deep into those grieving places all of us have experienced. Recommended for most collections.
In Chang’s fifth collection, she ardently searches for balance after the death of her mother ... The feeling of hope is a theme throughout this solid collection, in variations Chang evokes with grace, 'Hope / is the wildest bird, the one that flies / so fast it will either disappear or burst / into flames.' Chang’s poetry fine tunes that conflagration with acuity.
...exceptional ... The collection explores the newspaper obituary through prose blocks whose language moves between shuddering realism and more lyrical elaborations ... Chang’s poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore.
