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A review by brice_mo
With My Back to the World: Poems by Victoria Chang
5.0
Thanks to NetGalley and FSG for the ARC!
Obit is my favorite collection of poetry, so I was beyond excited to get a chance to read Victoria Chang’s With My Back to the World, a project in conversation with the artwork of Agnes Martin. Like her past several collections, this is a book birthed by self-imposed constraints, but like its predecessors, knowledge of those parameters isn’t necessary for enjoyment.
Over her past several collections, Victoria Chang has become increasingly concerned with the intersection of visual art and poetry, with Dear Memory signaling a turning point in the poet’s apparent desire for language to be material, tangible enough to withstand the physical realities of life. In With My Back to the World, that idea reaches its full fruition.
Chang’s prior work has long been thematically concerned with the inadequacy of language, and that continues here through her engagement with Martin’s art. The artist's paintings generally favor symmetry, and these predictable patterns act as the perfect vessel for the book’s subject matter. The avoidance of novelty in favor of iteration mirrors the way people seek language to explain pain. Sometimes repetition is all we have. Furthermore, the artist’s minimalism offers a kind of kinship for Chang’s austere specificity. The poet has such a delicate touch here that it feels intuitive to watch her attempt to gridlock depression. For those who share her struggle, they know that the pain is often in its amorphous inexplicability.
If it had a shape, it could be held.
This is where the poems in this collection live—the space between experience and its cause, a desire to understand feelings more than their origin. As Chang writes in “Aspiration, 1960,”
I am trying to draw a woman’s heartbeat, not the heart. The sensation of being strangled, not the hands around my neck.
As these poems accumulate, their disinterest in causality begins to form another question through punctured aphorisms and collocations—what is the role of art in light of its insufficiency? Why do we persist when it cannot solve anything? It’s a question with personal stakes in this book. I remember a professor criticizing me for referring to a poet by name rather than saying “the speaker” because we shouldn’t assume that the voice is one in the same, but here, Chang repeatedly acknowledges that she will be recognized in her work, even when she would like to be invisible. She poses the question most transparently in “The Islands, 1961”:
Is it possible to be seen, but not looked at?
It’s never answered directly, but I think readers will leave the book with their own ideas.
Like she did in The Trees Witness Everything and Obit, Chang breaks from her book’s form only once and very intentionally. In part two of the three-part structure, she writes a heartbreaking day-by-day account of the days surrounding her father’s death. There are references to other poems in the collection here, so it still feels like it’s in conversation with the rest of the book, but I was more struck by how each of Victoria Chang’s projects are gradually coming more directly into dialogue with each other. This feels like an extension of Obit, not as redundancy but as its cathartic completion.
The same could be said for With My Back to the World as a whole. Victoria Chang is an artist who constantly reinvents herself to better articulate the impossibility of reinvention, and I feel so privileged to be able to read her work.
Obit is my favorite collection of poetry, so I was beyond excited to get a chance to read Victoria Chang’s With My Back to the World, a project in conversation with the artwork of Agnes Martin. Like her past several collections, this is a book birthed by self-imposed constraints, but like its predecessors, knowledge of those parameters isn’t necessary for enjoyment.
Over her past several collections, Victoria Chang has become increasingly concerned with the intersection of visual art and poetry, with Dear Memory signaling a turning point in the poet’s apparent desire for language to be material, tangible enough to withstand the physical realities of life. In With My Back to the World, that idea reaches its full fruition.
Chang’s prior work has long been thematically concerned with the inadequacy of language, and that continues here through her engagement with Martin’s art. The artist's paintings generally favor symmetry, and these predictable patterns act as the perfect vessel for the book’s subject matter. The avoidance of novelty in favor of iteration mirrors the way people seek language to explain pain. Sometimes repetition is all we have. Furthermore, the artist’s minimalism offers a kind of kinship for Chang’s austere specificity. The poet has such a delicate touch here that it feels intuitive to watch her attempt to gridlock depression. For those who share her struggle, they know that the pain is often in its amorphous inexplicability.
If it had a shape, it could be held.
This is where the poems in this collection live—the space between experience and its cause, a desire to understand feelings more than their origin. As Chang writes in “Aspiration, 1960,”
I am trying to draw a woman’s heartbeat, not the heart. The sensation of being strangled, not the hands around my neck.
As these poems accumulate, their disinterest in causality begins to form another question through punctured aphorisms and collocations—what is the role of art in light of its insufficiency? Why do we persist when it cannot solve anything? It’s a question with personal stakes in this book. I remember a professor criticizing me for referring to a poet by name rather than saying “the speaker” because we shouldn’t assume that the voice is one in the same, but here, Chang repeatedly acknowledges that she will be recognized in her work, even when she would like to be invisible. She poses the question most transparently in “The Islands, 1961”:
Is it possible to be seen, but not looked at?
It’s never answered directly, but I think readers will leave the book with their own ideas.
Like she did in The Trees Witness Everything and Obit, Chang breaks from her book’s form only once and very intentionally. In part two of the three-part structure, she writes a heartbreaking day-by-day account of the days surrounding her father’s death. There are references to other poems in the collection here, so it still feels like it’s in conversation with the rest of the book, but I was more struck by how each of Victoria Chang’s projects are gradually coming more directly into dialogue with each other. This feels like an extension of Obit, not as redundancy but as its cathartic completion.
The same could be said for With My Back to the World as a whole. Victoria Chang is an artist who constantly reinvents herself to better articulate the impossibility of reinvention, and I feel so privileged to be able to read her work.