Victoria Chang

After her mother's death, Chang wrote deep into grief by composing "obits"--from her mother's blue dress to language itself.

Obit

Dear Memory

Trees Witness Everything

"With astringent understatement and wry economy, with nuance and intelligence and an enviable command of syntax and poetic line, Victoria Chang dissects the venerable practices of cultural piety and self-regard. She is a master of the thumbnail narrative. She can wield a dark eroticism. She is determined to tackle subject matter that is not readily subdued to the proportions of lyric. Her talent is conspicuous."--Linda Gregerson "Chang's voice is equal parts searing, vulnerable, and terrified."--American Poets Barbie Chang, Victoria Chang explores racial prejudice, sexual privilege, and the disillusionment of love through a reimagining of Barbie--perfect in the cultural imagination yet repeatedly falling short as she pursues the American dream. This energetic string of linked poems is full of wordplay, humor, and biting social commentary involving the quote-unquote speaker, Barbie Chang, a disillusioned Asian-American suburbanite. By turns woeful and passionate, playful and incisive, these poems reveal a voice insisting that "even silence is not silent." From "Barbie Chang Lives": Barbie Chang lives on Facebook has a house on Facebook street so she can erase herself Facebook is a country with no trees it allows her to believe people love her don't want to cover her Barbie Chang . . . Victoria Chang is the author of three previous poetry books. In 2013, she won the PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Chang teaches poetry at Chapman University and lives in Southern California.

Barbie Chang

A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life’s hardest questions: how to let go. In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” each poem is shaped by pattern and count. This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name—with reverence, economy, and whimsy—the ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.

The Trees Witness Everything

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.

Poems

With My Back to the World

A collection of poems by the award-winning author of Salvinia Molesta offers insight into her use of obsessive and linguistically playful language while reflecting American culture, power structures, family life and identity in the post-September 11 world.

The Boss

'Impeccable, precise poems, sometimes shocking and strange, but always startling' Irish Times A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life's hardest questions: how to let go. In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called 'wakas,' each poem is shaped by pattern and count. This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name - with reverence, economy and whimsy - the ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.

Taking its concept of concentricity from the eponymous Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, Circle, the first collection from Victoria Chang, adopts the shape as a trope for gender, family, and history. These lyrical, narrative, and hybrid poems trace the spiral trajectory of womanhood and growth and plot the progression of self as it ebbs away from and returns to its roots in an Asian American family and context. Locating human desire within the helixes of politics, society, and war, Chang skillfully draws arcs between T’ang Dynasty suicides and Alfred Hitchcock leading ladies, between the Hong Kong Flower Lounge and an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch, the Rape of Nanking and civilian casualties in Iraq.

Circle

Los Angeles Times Book Prize PEN Voelcker Award Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize New York Times 100 Notable Books Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books NPR's Best Books National Book Award in Poetry, Longlist National Book Critics Circle, Finalist Griffin Poetry Prize, Shortlist 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. 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. 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. '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

Frances Chin, a 10-year old Chinese-American girl, lives with her immigrant parents and older sister, Clara. At school Frances copes with bullies and the loneliness of not quite fitting in. And at home, her parents are preoccupied with work and worry about Clara, whose hair is inexplicably falling out. But, with the help of her friend Annie, Frances is determined to solve the mystery of Clara's condition. Frances's powerful inner voice resonates in gorgeous imagery and evocative free verse.

Love, Love

Victoria M. Chang

A modern poetry anthology that includes the work of a second generation of Asian American poets who are taking the best of the prior generation, but also breaking conventional patterns.

The Next Generation

Asian American Poetry

A poet watches the limbs of a eucalyptus tree get sawed off: the image persists, refracting and recurring across poems of art, language, selfhood, memory, and loss. Joan Mitchell said, When I talk about love, I mean loving a tree. When I talk about love, I mean loving where a tree used to be. Men assess the eucalyptus tree growing on the poet’s street; a crane arrives. The sound of a chainsaw rings in the air and branches begin to fall. This tree-cutting haunts the poet and becomes the locus from which the rest of the collection spirals. It refracts across works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell, and Hilma af Klint, whose painting series lends the collection its title and who becomes a model for engaging with the world. At the core of the collection, the long poem “Eureka” examines the violent 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans from the eponymous California town. Roving, evocative, and intricate, Tree of Knowledge is rooted in Victoria Chang’s crystalline voice and generous, probing gaze, and by certain images —trees, a hanging figure, a branch, fingertips, a briefcase—that resurface like apparitions.

Tree of Knowledge

For fans of Inside Out and Back Again, Other Words for Home, and A Place to Hang the Moon -- Eureka is a gorgeous and emotionally resonant novel-in-verse by multiple-award-winning poet Victoria Chang that sensitively and lyrically renders the tragic events surrounding the 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California. Love illuminates the dark. The year is 1885. San Francisco is dangerous for Chinese immigrants like twelve-year-old Mei Mei. She must venture on her own, without her family or friends, to Eureka, California, where it is supposedly safe. But 300 miles from home, Mei Mei misses her Ma Ma’s kindness, helping out in her Ba Ba’s store, and playing hide-and-seek with her best friend, Hua Hua. Despite her fear and the increasing violence against her community, she finds hope in an unexpected friend, the giant Redwood trees, and a new dream: learning how to read in English. As the world around her grows more scary, Mei Mei discovers her own power, as well as the joy of found family, the importance of courage, and the nature of freedom.

Eureka

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR Named One of the Best Poetry Collections of the Year by The Guardian, Literary Hub, and Electric Literature 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.

Bhanu Kapil

Jihyun Yun

Larissa Lai

Franny Choi

Hala Alyan

Monica Sok

Devi Laskar

Karen An-hwei Lee

Sun Yung Shin

Marilyn Chin

Ryka Aoki

Diana Khoi Nguyen

Jane Wong

Nancy Chen Long

Eileen Tabios

Carlina Duan

Michelle Lee

Doyali Islam

Jessica Abughattas

Dena Igusti

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Paul Tran

Cynthia Dewi Oka

Mary-Kim Arnold

Mia Ayumi Malhotra

Maw Shein Win

Do Nguyen Mai

Shazia Hafiz Ramji

Su Cho

Jenna Le

Su Fang Ng

Isabella Wang

Amy Lam

Angie Sijun Lou

Nellie Wong

Torsa Ghosal

Kailee Pedersen

Manahil Bandukwala

Allison Albino

Sarah Audsley

Hajjar Baban

Maria Isabelle Carlos

Catherine Chen

Jennifer Cheng

Debra Kang Dean

Anuja Ghimire

Kate Hao

Mai-Linh Hong

C. X. Hua

Resi Ibanez

Ann Inoshita

Maya Khosla

Maddie Kim

Juliet Kono

Hyejung Kook

Iria Law

Mari L 'Esperance

Pacyinz Lyfoung

Meher Manda

Aurora Masum-Javed

Lani Montreal

Amy Patel

Yamini Pathak

Michelle Penaloza

Angela Penaredondo

Megan Pinto

Preeti Kaur Rajpal

Swati Rana

Karen Rigby

Raena Shirali

C. E. Shue

Kristen Sze-Tu

Lehua Taitano

Alaisha Verdeflor

Kara Kai Wang

Annette Wong

Shelly Wong

Jessica Yuan

They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets is a collection of hundreds of contemporary poems by both established and emerging Asian American Women Poets.

An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets

They Rise Like a Wave

Spring Planting

In this irreverent, hilarious, and charming picture book, award-winning poet Victoria Chang and celebrated artist Marla Frazee show that all toddlers love their mommies—no matter what. Is Mommy tall or short? Short! Is Mommy fun or boring? Boring! In this joyous ode to hardworking mothers everywhere—who may not always be fun or organized or neat—Victoria Chang asks, do their toddlers love them anyway? Of course! Marla Frazee’s colorful and humorous illustrations bring this simple text—perfect for reading aloud—to vivid life.

with audio recording

Is Mommy?

Ready to explore China? Experience the beautiful citiescuisines and cultures? Then look no further. this book "Beautiful China" by Victoria Chang this travel guides is full with customized itineraries with top suggestions, precise maps of China, and exclusive information from insiders. Whether you intend to climb the Great Wall, tour the Forbidden City, try amazing dishes, spend a vacation or discover the Terracotta Warriors, this up-to-date manual will help you plan it all out. In this book you will discover: - Brief history of china and its Dynasties and Emperors, - insight about china economy, weather, transportation - learn a bit of Chinese language like important greetings, simple courtesy all the basic words you'll be using. - What you need to pack when visiting china - Various fun things to do and places you should definitely visit. - savory foods you need to try. And much more! Click the "Add to cart" Button to get this amazing book.

China Travel Guide

Beautiful China

Victoria Chang

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