Reviewed by Z. L. Nickels
There is something poetic about Victoria Chang's book debuting against the backdrop of a global pandemic. That this collection of distilled grief, written "during a feverish two weeks . . . for all she lost in the world," would be released at a time when each of us is responsible for our own endless, two-week periods of grief. Make no mistake, Chang tells us: grief is about future absence. I suppose what I really mean to say is, now is the right time for this book of poetry.
Throughout Obit, Chang is offering an image, a picture of death to express her loss as opposed to memorializing the dead. She draws the shape of her plane of words early—on the first two pages, with the first two poems:
My Father's Frontal Lobe—died
unpeacefully of a stroke on June 24,
2009 at Scripps Memorial Hospital in
San Diego, California.*
My Mother—died unpeacefully on
August 3, 2015 in her room at Walnut
Village Assisted Living in Anaheim,
California of pulmonary fibrosis.
With these simple dedications, Chang unfurls the backdrop to her first philosophies of grief and loss. Her father had a stroke; six years later, her mother died. These dedications serve as a warning to the reader: what you are about to witness is a testimony of everything I have lost.
But this testimony is not tantamount to a confession. This book is a book of obituaries—that is, it is a book of literature posing in the guise of that which it is not. In this book, the content is the given, and the form is what is elevated. This is where the genius begins. In Obit, when Victoria Chang's father loses his logic, language, reason, civility and gait, he loses his form. Conversely, it is when her mother loses her lungs, teeth, hands, hope, home, oxygen, optimism and, finally, her future, that she loses her content. Her father is form without content; her mother is content without form. The two coalesce to shape the image. And Chang is simply telling the story.
What do we call a testimony that does not confess? One word is story. Another is narrative. We call narrative poetry narrative not because we are being told a story we do not know, but because this story is one we need help imagining. Make the world poetic, we beg. Notice: we never ask, please locate the poetry in the world. But Chang does not operate this way. By taking a form used as a record—the obituary—and transforming it, she is able to create something figural, something which is poetic.
Language—died, brilliant and beautiful
on August 1, 2009 at 2:46 p.m. Lover
of raising his hand, language lived
a full life of questioning. His favorite
was twisting what others said.
In doing so, she elevates her work above the ideal while managing to reclaim the real. That is to say, she reshapes our understanding of narrative poetry and, simultaneously, rescues it from those who believe that they can postulate on death having never died:
Updike must not have watched
someone slowly suffocating. Our air
goes in and out like silk in the folders
of our lungs.*
Her head gone.
Her face gone. Rilke was wrong. The
body is nothing without the head.
This is Victoria Chang. The same Victoria Chang who dies in the third poem, who is paradoxically the same Victoria Chang who dies in the fourth poem, and in the tenth poem, and in the eighty-seventh poem, who is the same Victoria Chang who is writing these poems and who is giving us, in every offering, at least one or two absolutely gorgeous lines. The resulting effect is enough to take your breath away—what a beautiful way to simulate death.
Every
time, I run out of air. Every time, I
realize I don't want to die. Every time, I
realize death doesn't care what I want.
Through it all, she never loses sight of the significance of what she is attempting to accomplish. Because of this, she is able to turn her head away from the literary canon and, shaking it, say: You're wrong. Don't write about death. You're bad at it.
Maybe she is right. There is so much distance to overcome here. Presented in four separate sections (I-IV), this book examines these first philosophies by balancing the obituaries with a series of tankas that function as letters to her children—yet another way in which Chang imbues a non-literary form (the letter) with poetic content. These letters quietly align every theme in this collection: because her mother dies, because her father suffers a stroke and starts to die, it follows that Victoria Chang will also die. It follows that her children ought to know this.
But what do I know?
I know that a mother dies.*
The hopeful poets
never seem to have my dreams,
never seem to have my children.
This is where we experience the most immediate tension. By asking us to look toward the future instead of the past, Chang grounds the reader in the present with a form we recognize. It is the only time you can sense her burdens softening. But no matter where we find ourselves in Obit, we can find grief, and it is constant. It moves with the collection—it moves with every section. Chang's grief propels us a great distance, across a truly astounding ninety-six poems about death, reminding us that grief is a verb. It moves.
If you cut
out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky,
no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it
with a blue frame, place it faceup on
the floor of an empty museum with an
open atrium to the sky, that is grief.*
The problem is, my father's
brain won't stop walking, and my dead
mother is everywhere.
And so it is in the midst of this movement that we are drawn back to the figure. We want to know where we can locate it. After all, the figure is what we are searching for in all these records of death. But once we discover it, what exactly are we able to do with it? More to the point, what can we do with it?
During the first section of Obit, Chang is teaching us the stakes; in the third section, she is preparing us for death; by the final section, there is no one left but her children. Amidst these sections, there are pictures. There are words. There is evidence that all these things happened. Every poem is evidence of a memory of Victoria Chang's, given to us as a representation of all she has lost. It is her testimony, mediated through the image of her life. For this to work, we require the figure—not just the record. By now, that this works should go without saying.
The pictures sent
back are silent. A picture represents
a moment that has died. . .
When we
remember the dead, at some point, we
are remembering the picture, not the
moment.
In preparing this review, I kept a list of every poem I would need to revisit to discuss the most prevalent themes of this book. Here is a small sample of that list: ". . . 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 77 . . ." I now realize this was a fool's errand; despite my best attempts, I still have yet to capture the full breadth of Obit. I suspect that this is the closest I will come: this book contains ninety-six poems about grief and loss, and every one of them is good. Every single one of them. By the end of it, you are exhausted, left only with the questions you want answered. And there are still so, so many questions I want answered.
I want to know how Victoria Chang is able to write about death so convincingly. I want to know why other great writers cannot. I want to know how she wrote seventy-one obituaries, twenty-four tankas and one twelve-page, Sylvia Plath-titled, form-be-damned meditation on how "if we / push the wheel forward we ignore death if / we walk backwards we repeat death so we / stand still and try to outlast death." I want to know how she managed to channel her grief instead of allowing it to consume her. I want to know whether she believes she has transcended form. I want to know why she wrote about her mother in fifty-two poems, her children in thirty-four poems, her father in thirty-two poems, and her spouse only once. I want to know whether she considers this book an elegy. I want to know whether she still blames God.
Most of all, I want to know why Victoria Chang wanted to know the date of her mother's death. Because I cannot think of anything worse than knowing when this all ends. I do not want to die. Neither do you.
But I have never had a parent die. Someday I will. Some of you have already lost your parents. No doubt you will take something different from this that the rest of us are unable to. But for those of us who have not yet suffered loss in this way, we will not have to wonder what it is like. Perhaps Chang is right. Maybe nothing is an elegy. But it is still important that this story has both a beginning and an end.