OBIT

I was introduced to the poetry of Victoria Chang in her third book The Boss. McSweeney's started publishing a "Poetry Series" and I had a subscription. The Boss was the fifth book in the series and published in 2013. So the book "fell into my lap."

What I found inside was wonderful and intriguing. Each poem was structured with stanzas of four lines, and they appeared to be somewhat formal until one started to read. Poems were filled with echoes, internal rhymes, slant rhymes, allusions, alliteration, puns, and the like. There was no punctuation. Sentences and phrases sometimes ended in the middle of a line. Other times they ran across line breaks. I was forced to slow down and really pay attention to what I was reading. The reward was that once I figured out how to read these poems they really opened up. The challenge was absolutely worth the time and effort.

As the title of the book suggests, as well as many of the titles of individual poems, many of the poems revolve around a boss. A few poems are about family members. A handful are about Edward Hopper paintings. They are all, in one way or another, about power and relationships and power within relationships.

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Barbie Chang, Victoria Chang's fourth book of poetry, published in 2017, carried forward her "project" of poems about interpersonal relationships. The poems in this book are broken into four sections. Sections one and three are filled with poems with coupled lines that function similar to the four-line stanzas in The Boss. Images and phrases run across line breaks and through the borders of the couplets, without sacrificing any of the wit and wordplay I loved. Sections two and four are "Dear P." sonnets.

There is a slight shift in content, too, as these poems are less about power and, in some sense, more personal. They are definitely focused upon relationships of one to those around us. The narrator is also dealing with parents who are in ill health and having to navigate how to take care of them amidst all of the other aspects of her life.

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Which brings us to Obit. This is Victoria Chang's most personal book of poems. It is infused with loss and grief, brokenness and death.

The majority of the poems are presented in a form that mimics obituary notices in a newspaper. The subject of a death (for example, "memory"), followed by the date of its death, leads into the main body of the prose poem laid out on the page in a column of text. They are punctuated, making the poems themselves a bit easier to read, but the wordplay and imagery is intact.

Every so often there is a set of paired tanka. I'm not quite sure how they function with the rest of the poems quite yet, but will soon figure it out. There is also one section of "fractured" sonnets, similar to the final "Dear P." section in Barbie Chang.

Most of the poems are about the stroke her father suffered or the illness and death of her mother. In the midst of her sorrow and grief, she writes beautiful lines about the loss. She infuses them with a bit of absurdity and a healthy helping of dark humor and a willingness to examine the reality of the suffering we all engage in life.

I need a couple of more readings of these poems to get a good grasp on them. I am absolutely ready to do just that!