Reviews tagging 'Dementia'

Obit by Victoria Chang

7 reviews

cantfindmybookmark's review

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emotional reflective sad fast-paced

4.0


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edilund's review

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challenging emotional reflective sad

5.0


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felixculpa's review

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced

5.0


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jayisreading's review

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challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

A heartbreaking and beautifully written collection, in which Chang takes the obituary format and refashions them into poems for her to explore her grief in an unflinching manner, meditating on parental illness/death and its lasting impact. What I found powerful was the way Chang highlighted how death and grief encompass more than a loved one’s passing, highlighting a multitude of things that also get caught in death’s hands. I liked that these poems showed how grief is a nonlinear exploration, in which time makes little difference, because, really, isn’t that how grieving works in the end?

I admit that I wasn’t a huge fan of the middle section of this collection, maybe because it was a little difficult for me to follow due to its jaggedness (for lack of a better word). There were some beautiful imagery in this long-form poem, though, even if I didn’t fully grasp their meaning.

Read for the Sealey Challenge. 

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penofpossibilities's review

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4.0


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spinesinaline's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced

3.5

A poetry collection that deals quite heavily in personal and familial grief. Chang’s poems each take the form of an obituary, grieving the loss of language, time, and hope, among others, in the wake of her father’s stroke and worsening amnesia and her mother’s illness and death.

It’s a very heavy collection and feels a bit like drowning as Chang uses these poems to make sense of her emotions and put her grief to words. Some of the poems really resonated and I enjoyed the unique obituary style, but there were some sections that had more of an abstract format and they’ll likely take me a few more read-throughs to really grasp.

Thanks to Cori @ Bookish Cori on IG for her review that brought this one to my attention!

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bookishcori's review

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0


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