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    Obit
    Obit
    Obit
    Ebook135 pages1 hour

    Obit

    By Victoria Chang

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020

    Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020

    NPR's Best Books of 2020

    National Book Award in Poetry, Longlist

    Frank Sanchez Book Award

    After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of “the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.” These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died (“civility,” “language,” “the future,” “Mother’s blue dress”) and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.

    "When you lose someone you love, the world doesn’t stop to let you mourn. Nor does it allow you to linger as you learn to live with a gaping hole in your heart. Indeed, this daily indifference to being left behind epitomizes the unique pain of grieving. Victoria Chang captures this visceral, heart-stopping ache in Obit, the book of poetry she wrote after the death of her mother. Although Chang initially balked at writing an obituary, she soon found herself writing eulogies for the small losses that preceded and followed her mother’s death, each one an ode to her mother’s life and influence. Chang also thoughtfully examines how she will be remembered by her own children in time."—Time Magazine

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateApr 7, 2020
    ISBN9781619322189
    Obit

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    Reviews for Obit

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      your fans will really enjoy this book. ... If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel Star, just submit your story to hardy@novelstar.top or joye@novelstar.top
    • 5/5
      I have never felt so small and so insignificant in a very long time

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This book was recommended to me by Book Riot's Tailored Book Recommendation service. It was an excellent if uncomfortable read. A collection of obituaries to all the big and little losses after the author's mother dies, and her father experiences a series of strokes. Such a complicated rendering of grief.
    • 4/5
      I don't read much modern poetry, but I picked up this collection because I was intrigued by its premise. Poet Victoria Chang writes about the deaths of her parents in many poems that take on the formal attributes of old-fashioned newspaper obituaries. I found the "obit" poems the most accessible and moving. Other poems focus on words and phrases connected only by spaces. These didn't work as well for me, perhaps because I was unsure how to interpret them. All in all, this is a noteworthy collection that touches upon dementia, loss, and grief.
    • 5/5
      National Book Award for Poetry 2020 longlistThe best book about grief I have read. After the death of her mother, Chang began writing "obits" of different aspects of her mothers--and then her father's--lives. Her mother suffered from and died of lung disease, her father of stroke complications. Optimism, caretakers, language, memory, the priest, the car, she herself--all receive obituaries (some multiples) written in this style.It is clever, but it is also very real and very sad.

    Book preview

    Obit - Victoria Chang

    Obit

    VICTORIA CHANG

    Note to the Reader

    Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your device so that the line of characters below appears on one line, if possible.

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque euismod.

    When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

    Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

    This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

    For my mother and my children.

    Contents

    Title Page

    Note to Reader

    I

    My Father’s Frontal Lobe

    My Mother

    Victoria Chang

    Victoria Chang

    Voice Mail

    Language

    My children, children

    Each time I write hope

    Language

    Victoria Chang

    The Future

    Civility

    My Mother’s Lungs

    Privacy

    My Mother’s Teeth

    I tell my children

    I tell my children

    Friendships

    Gait

    Logic

    Optimism

    Ambition

    Chair

    Do you smell my cries?

    I tell my children

    Tears

    Memory

    Language

    Tomas Tranströmer

    Approval

    Sometimes all I have

    You don’t need a thing

    Secrets

    Music

    Appetite

    Appetite

    Form

    Optimism

    I can’t say with faith

    To love anyone

    Hands

    Oxygen

    Reason

    Home

    Memory

    II

    I Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue.

    III

    Friendships

    Caretakers

    Subject Matter

    Sadness

    Empathy

    The Obituary Writer

    Do you see the tree?

    My children, children

    The Doctors

    Yesterday

    Grief

    Doctors

    Blame

    Time

    Today I show you

    My children, children

    Form

    Control

    The Situation

    Memory

    Doctors

    Obsession

    My children, children

    My children don’t have

    The Clock

    Hope

    The Head

    The Blue Dress

    Hindsight

    The Priest

    I put on a shirt

    Where do they find hope?

    The Car

    My Mother’s Favorite Potted Tree

    Similes

    Affection

    Home

    When a mother dies

    My children, children

    The Bees

    Victoria Chang

    Clothes

    Guilt

    The Ocean

    The Face

    My children say no

    Have you ever looked

    IV

    America

    I am ready to

    My children, children

    Notes

    About the Author

    Also by Victoria Chang

    Acknowledgements

    Copyright

    Special Thanks

    OBIT

    I

    Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak

    wispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

    —William Shakespeare, Macbeth

    My Father’s Frontal Lobe—died unpeacefully of a stroke on June 24, 2009 at Scripps Memorial Hospital in San Diego, California. Born January 20, 1940, the frontal lobe enjoyed a good life. The frontal lobe loved being the boss. It tried to talk again but someone put a bag over it. When the frontal lobe died, it sucked in its lips like a window pulled shut. At the funeral for his words, my father wouldn’t stop talking and his love passed through me, fell onto the ground that wasn’t there. I could hear someone stomping their feet. The body is as confusing as language—was the frontal lobe having a tantrum or dancing? When I took my father’s phone away, his words died in the plastic coffin. At the funeral for his words, we argued about my miscarriage. It’s not really a baby, he said. I ran out of words, stomped out to shake the dead baby awake. I thought of the tech who put the wand down, quietly left the room when she couldn’t find the heartbeat. I understood then that darkness is falling without an end. That darkness is not the absorption of color but the absorption of language.

    My Mother—died unpeacefully on August 3, 2015 in her room at Walnut Village Assisted Living in Anaheim, California of pulmonary fibrosis. The room was born on July 3, 2012. The Village wasn’t really a village. No walnut trees. Just cut flowers. Days before, the hospice nurse silently slid the stethoscope on top of my mother’s lung and

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