Victoria Chang's Obit Joins Tradition of Apophatic Lyricism

At Jacket2, Eric Weiskott reviews Victoria Chang's Obit (Copper Canyon, 2020), "a book of grief" that "joins a tradition of apophatic lyricism that runs through Keats, Dickinson, and Ashbery, as well as Chang’s own prior books." More:

Chang develops the newspaper obituary form. In most poems, title and deceased are one and the same. Obit, the book, is built tall and thin, columnar, and so are the text blocks on each page. Obit includes obituaries for “Form,” “Language,” “Similes,” “Subject Matter,” “The Obituary Writer,” and “Victoria Chang,” among others. Grief effaces the self. “In returning out of the tears, the first person I dissolves a little more each time” (93). This quality prevents the book from being simply confessional, since the coherence of the I who speaks is explicitly in question. As in other poetry books of grief, such as Anne Carson’s Nox (New Directions, 2010) and Prageeta Sharma’s Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019), Chang favors the prose poem: poetry in mourning dress.

Tankas addressed to (Chang’s) children punctuate the prose poetry. These poems double the generational perspective of the book, a gesture Chang made in Barbie Chang as well. The second section of Obit is a long lineated poem, “I Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue” (a line of Sylvia Plath’s), and this is the only poem that answers to the back cover’s advertisement of “a stunning lyrical distillation of grief,” for otherwise the book works hard not to distill grief into lyric. Even “I Am a Miner” undercuts itself pointedly: “Everyone wanted          poems with an emperor             a head / looped inside a rope but this            poem is           tepid    this / poem is no epic” (52). The obituaries, in part because of their prose form and the reference to the conventions of local newspapers, maintain an oppressive awareness of the sleight of hand whereby text supplants experience.… 

Read the full review at Jacket2.