Dear Memory
Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief
Published on 10. August 2023
162 pages
978-1-57131-736-0 (ISBN)
Description
Award-winning poet Victoria Chang's
Dear Memory is a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.
For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.
Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.
In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.
"Chang's work is excavation, a digging through the muck of society for an existential clarity, a cultural clarity and a general clarity of self." - New York Times Book Review
"Groundbreaking... Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." -NPR
"Both a chronicling of [Chang's] family's history and a powerful, stirring rumination on ancestry, inherited trauma and home." - TIME
For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.
Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.
In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.
"Chang's work is excavation, a digging through the muck of society for an existential clarity, a cultural clarity and a general clarity of self." - New York Times Book Review
"Groundbreaking... Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." -NPR
"Both a chronicling of [Chang's] family's history and a powerful, stirring rumination on ancestry, inherited trauma and home." - TIME
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
11/2021
Milkweed Editions
€22.50
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Person
Victoria Chang is the author of
Dear Memory. Her poetry books include
OBIT,
Barbie Chang,
The Boss,
Salvinia Molesta, and
Circle.
OBIT received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN Voeckler Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was long-listed for the National Book Award. She is also the author of a children's picture book,
Is Mommy?, illustrated by Marla Frazee and named a
New York Times Notable Book, and a middle grade novel,
Love, Love. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Katherine Min MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch University's low-residency MFA program.
Content
- Intro
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Dear Mother
- Dear Grandmother
- Dear Silence
- Dear Grandfather
- Dear D
- Dear Mother
- Dear Body
- Dear Teacher
- Dear L
- Dear Teacher
- Dear Mother
- Dear C
- Dear Teacher
- Dear T
- Dear G
- Dear Teacher
- Dear Daughters
- Dear Teacher
- Dear Sister
- Dear Teacher
- Dear Father
- Dear Teacher
- Dear Daughter
- Dear Ford Motor Company
- Dear Daughter
- Dear Father
- Dear B
- Dear Father
- Dear Y
- Dear Reader
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
