Victoria Chang's new poetry book is exciting to read. It's like entering an art gallery, where you not only take in the art but also marvel at the organization of what's on display. She includes many different kinds of forms here: erasure, prose poetry, rhymed couplets, and diary-type entries. Most of the poems are about loss, depression, and the process of art-making. Most of the time I was deeply moved by the poems, and others I felt lost and bewildered (but maybe that's the point). I always enjoy her poems whenever I read them, and will continue to seek out her work. I wouldn't be surprised to see this collection get many awards this year.

With My Back to the World, Victoria Chang
In her latest poetry book, With My Back to the World, Victoria Chang traces her reaction to abstract paintings, where she finds a communion in their recognition of the gaps between feeling and artistic expression, between emotion and language. This is not new territory for Chang – most of her poetry collections explore the adequacy or inadequacy of forms of any kind to express emotion fully and honestly. In OBIT, she used the physical columnar form of newspaper obituaries to contain, and to explode beyond, the emotions of grief and the experience of loss.

Here, she takes on a harder challenge, and is wildly inventive and exciting in her approach. Following Agnes Martin’s abstract art, she traces her own experience as a woman and an artist, and her experience of her father’s illness and death. The challenge is made harder because Agnes Martin’s artwork is unknown to most people who do not follow art closely and do not have access to galleries and museums. Martin’s work is abstract, based on repetition of lines or grids or dots, and the real impact of her art occurs when it is witnessed in person – the subtle brush work, the softly blurred lines in an apparently regular shape. The artwork’s subtleties, and scale, do not carry over well to printed reproductions. Unless you have seen Martin’s work in person at a gallery or museum, you really won’t “get” it. Chang’s attempt to give the reader some sense of the art, as she reacts with it or to it, includes naming poems with the title and year of a Martin piece, and having an imaginary dialogue with Martin as they look at the artwork together. That’s inventive, and pulls the reader in, but it also leaves the art and its impact, and the personality of Martin herself, unknown by the person reading the poetry. Chang complicates this even further by never telling the reader who the artist is – she mentions “Agnes” but there is nothing in the titles or intro to inform you the artist is Agnes Martin; you’ll need to deduce that from reviews and blurbs, and wonder how anyone figured it out. This adds a lot of work for the reader, and increases the ante for the poetry – will it be worth it?

I saw the blurbs and reviews mentioning Agnes Martin, and found an online documentary about her life and work. That added a good layer of depth to how I read Chang’s poems. Without that, I would not have sustained an interest in the poetry itself. Don’t get me wrong – it’s very good poetry, and there are images and lines that sparkle with insight and ask big questions. But tethering the whole thing to and being in dialogue with art and an artist that I can’t figure out is a really big ask of the reader, and would have left me exhausted and confused.

The poems themselves, per usual with Victoria Chang, are startling and insightful, veering rapidly from a huge personal grief into an observation about art in general, or Agnes Martin’s work in particular, and back again. That technique threads a needle, ever so skillfully, between deeply internal and hidden feelings and the artist’s need to express them, and really does stitch art and life together in a wonderful way. All the while, Chang sees how inadequate any art or language can be, and how an artist (and a woman) is always on the knife edge of wanting to be seen but not watched, not misunderstood. In The Islands, 1961, she asks: “Agnes left some lines uncovered on the borders, showing us how happiness is made. How even happiness is made by writing something down, then leaving it exposed for all to see. Is it possible to be seen, but not looked at?”

These philosophical battles about art, language, what is true or what is observed, what is exposed or not, the extra edge of being a woman, being a daughter – all make the poetry challenging, worthwhile, very intelligent, wonderfully creative, always fluid. This is a worthwhile poetry book—difficult, but definitely worthwhile.
Martin’s art is decidedly non-representational. She meant it to be experienced, responded to. She carefully avoided any representation, and went so far as to refuse to have titles of the artwork printed in a gallery catalogue – experience it, don’t read it, don’t try to figure out what it is, she might have said. If you haven’t seen Martin’s art but perhaps have seen a piece of Mark Rothko’s art, you’ll get it. I admire the courage and inventiveness of Victoria Chang in writing poetry – language! representation! nouns and verbs! – that uses such art as a launching pad. And in using the poetry and the art to navigate grief, feelings of inadequacy (what daughter doesn’t feel that?), sadness about her father’s death. The personal ache of the father’s death provides many of the moments the poetry reaches out to the reader.

The poetry collection plays with the ideas of art abstraction, showing the text of a poem overlaid with squiggles and made into an unreadable work of abstraction, and then providing the text of the poem. This constant back and forth keeps the reader immersed in the idea of abstract art, and the need to simply look at something and experience it before it can be read and understood. A few of the attempts to mirror a piece of art do not work so well – an example is Little Sister, where the art work is constructed of rows of dots formed by nails, and the poem reflecting that artwork is words broken up by regular dots, sort of like faux line-breaks. Lacking the texture, the physicalness, the starting contrast between material and title that the artwork holds, a poem broken up by dots just doesn’t bring the same effect. Other poems where, for example, Martin’s gridwork paintings are transformed into a poem with grids of phrases work much better (With My Back to the World, 1997).

The poems are at their best when Chang is simply doing what she does best – questioning, shaking grief loose by making it tangible in unexpected ways. In Untitled #10, 2002, she asks, “What happens if these aren’t pastoral or war poems? When I can feel the light I carry on my back but can’t see it or use it? // When sadness and language cast the same shadow. These six strips are the shadows of our blood, proving that every woman’s life can // be broken into and displayed.” She finishes that poem softly referring to both her parents’ deaths, then going back to the question of art: “Maybe our bodies never had a vanishing point, // so there will always be hunger. Even a woman’s life is trying to become more than the woman it represents.” Boom.

Thanks to #netgalley, and #fsg (#Farrar, Straus and Giroux) for the ARC.

A delicate and lovingly written collection of ekphrastic poetry. Chang writes poems inspired by the works of artist Agnes Martin while weaving in themes of grief, womanhood, and human connection. The collection boasts interesting form and erasure/blackout poems, along with rich metaphorical prose. A really lovely read.

My favorite poems are: "Summer, 1964", "Buds, 1959", "Untitled IX, 1982", and "Untitled, 2004."

A stunningly beautiful collection of ekphrastic poetry that tackles themes around grief, loss, depression, family, and the limits of language.

This latest collection by Victoria Chang is inspired by, and in conversation with, the abstract minimalist art of Agnes Martin. Each poem takes its title from one of her paintings, and I found myself eagerly flipping between Google and each poem to explore the painting, then think about the connection between Martin's and Chang's pieces. Chang also prefaces some of the text poems with more avant-garde artistic treatments of her poem that you read on the following page, from blocking it into grids (like Agnes Martin), to drawing curlicue squiggles across the lines, to completely blacking it out. This added another dimension of appreciation for me.

Like so many good poems, these invite you to read and savor them one at a time, rather than quickly moving to the next. I found myself highlighting and annotating many lines to remember later. A few standout poems that I will return to again and again:

Buds, 1959
Grass, 1967
Falling Blue, 1963
The Tree, 1964
Fiesta, 1985
Today (a masterpiece of a long poem)
Untitled #5, 1998


Definitely check out this collection; it's short but packs a punch. Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This collection masterfully marries the feelings of despair and depression with the beauty of art and life. Somehow, Chang is able to carefully create entire lifetimes in each small poem while also telling the story of the painting the poem is named after. They also carefully walk through the binary if feeling and remembering and how those things differ but live in the same spaces. This collection also deals with mortality and the space of after. In a way, I think Chang wants us to leave each painting and poem knowing how empty and exhilarating life is after walking away from something—whether that something is a spider web, a life, or wheat fields. Masterfully done. I’ll be thinking about these poems for a very long time.

** A copy of With My Back to the World was provided by the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review **

I think it's safe to say Victoria Chang is one of my favourite writers. I've read four books/collections by her and rated all of them five stars each! No one writes about/with/beside grief, love and depression as well as Victoria does! With My Back to the World is a collection of poems I took my time with but devoured at the same time. So many of the pieces resonated with me deeply and I've definitely found some new favourite lines and poems. Thought-provoking, moving, melancholic, and poignant, this collection is a beautiful triumph!

❝What happened when you're not supposed to be depressed? When depression becomes a form of your happiness?❞

Thought provoking poetry weaving together feminism and silent thoughts of the world in a melancholic perspective, Chang captures the small appreciation for determined to meddling thoughts of women. Good consistent prose and voice however nothing that particularly stood out to me. I found the painting Agnes hard to highlight without consistent context and build up. It was definitely a miss and an opportunity to include a factual premise/foreword or an anecdote to a powerful allegory. Perhaps having references in the beginning or occasional footnote would make this much more engaging and interesting to revisit. Thus, this personally this wasn’t for me but still holding worthy of a read for anyone interested in themes of grief, depression, and feminism. (2.5 stars)

Thank you to Net Galley and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I will preface this by noting that I have enjoyed everything I've read by this author. I always find something interesting, different, profound and thought-provoking. To date, this one is the most abstract and I'm sure there were ideas or passages I didn't completely understand; just as with Agnes Martin's art. After reading, I did look at a lot of Martin's art to understand the connection between the poems. Abstract art has always been difficult for me. Yet, these poems opened me to a new expression and a different way to understand the author's feelings of depression, loss, grief, self and existence. There is a beauty and emotion in everything she writes.

Was not quite what I was expecting, but was still beautiful. These were poems dealing with depression, grief, and art. Some of it went a bit over my head and were hard to understand, but overall the feel of the poetry was deep and moving.

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

Collection of poems you won't want to miss!

Loved the format, and visuals. It really brought the poems together from abstract to real.

Many topics are covered, but handled gently and explore self, how you view and how others view you, feminism, life - death and everything in between, how to handle grief & depression.

I really enjoyed this collection. These poems are in constant conversation with Agnes Martin's paintings and it's cool how Victoria uses those paintings as a springboard to launch her own ideas. I've never seen poetry do that before.

Each poem is named after an Agnes painting and it was fun to google the paintings while reading. Some poems are formatted in grids like the paintings which is cool. There are few line breaks in the poetry, most are blocks of text that look like prose. This isn't a bad thing, and I didn't mind it.

I love Victoria Chang’s poetry! She has such a striking ability to write poems about grief that instantly make me cry. This collection is largely about grief and love and having recently lost someone I felt overwhelmed by my ability to connect to Chang’s poems. The poems in the first and third section are about the work of Agnes Martin and the middle section is about the death of her father. I found all of these sections impactful but was blown away by the poetry in section one. What an astounding poetry collection.