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Poems
by Victoria Chang
A new collection of poetry inspired by the work of Agnes Martin, exploring topics of feminism, art, depression, and grief, by the author of the prizewinning collection Obit.
Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square.
With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang's new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.
Who did you suspect of the crime? Did your opinion about the guilty party change over the course of the novel?
I suspected multiple people at different points in the story but for a while I was convinced it was the employee who told Olivia about the trail leading up to the back of Victoria's house.
-Kathleen_K2
"Painterly, meditative ... Full of memorable insights as Chang experiments with erased and occluded work, all the while operating in the realm of feeling, where 'desire is the only thing / with nerve endings.' These elegiac poems thoughtfully balance the head and the heart." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Intriguingly, throughout this exhilarating collection Chang's own illustrations parallel the energy her writing conveys. Braving bouts of depression, she reasons with it in "Summer, 1964," "we depend on each other for our sadness." Chang's lines are immediate and affecting; much like Martin's radiant paintings, they exist to be seen and felt, read and absorbed." ―Booklist (starred review)
"The magnetism of Chang's language will convince you of the power of her project ... Again and again, there's the moment of recognition that readers come to poetry for: Here is a feeling you know well, but have never been able to witness outside of yourself. Isn't it liberating to put these words to it? Don't you feel less alone in your loneliness?" ―BookPage (starred review)
This information about With My Back to the World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Victoria Chang's forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World was published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her latest book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature.
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The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: The power to see, to sense, and to say. ...
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