Obit

The breakout collection about grief, loss and living from award-winning Asian American poet Victoria Chang, whose star is rising. When someone you love dies, everything dies. Her blue dress dies. Empathy dies. Friendships die. You, having survived, die. Obit is a stunning lyrical distillation of grief, written by Victoria Chang after the death of her mother.Initially refusing to write elegies for fear of cliche, Chang heard the word 'obit' and was moved by the strength of its sound, the long O and the hard T. She began writing obituaries for the many casualties of death - one long, skinny rectangle to chronicle each person, experience, object gone - and this became a new form with which to study sorrow. Chang's poetic obituaries are punctuated by formal interruptions, including a series of tankas that reflect on the emotional paradox of parenting while grappling with parental loss.In writing a book about grief, Victoria Chang holds a mirror to life; Obit reveals a stubborn search for language and for hope. 'Chang's new collection explores her father's illness and her mother's death, treating mortality as a constantly shifting enigma. A serene acceptance of grief' New York Times, "100 Notable Books of 2020"'Exceptional... Chang's poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore'Publishers Weekly