The Trees Witness Everything
Published on 26. April 2022
76 pages
978-1-61932-251-6 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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Victoria Chang
The Trees Witness Everything
Book
06/2022
Copper Canyon Press,U.S.
€16.50
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Person
Born in Detroit, Michigan to Taiwanese immigrants, Victoria Chang was educated at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford Business School and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson. She is the author of six books of poetry, including Obit, which was named a "New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020" and included on Time Magazine's "100 Must-Read Books of 2020." She lives in Southern California with her family and serves as the Program Chair of Antioch's Low-Residency MFA Program.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Note to the Reader
- Dedication
- Contents
- I
- Far Along in the Story
- Losing a Language
- Green Fields
- Convenience
- The Cold before the Moonrise
- Horses
- First Sight
- Prophecy
- Snowfall
- Still Morning
- When You Go Away
- To the Book
- News of the Assassin
- The Flight
- To Ashes
- Avoiding News by the River
- The Old Room
- Thanks
- The Shortest Night
- Ancestral Voices
- Passing
- History
- Rain Light
- Gift
- The Thread
- No One
- Fly
- Invocation
- The River of Bees
- Orioles
- Another Year Come
- Calling Late
- To the Rain
- Little Soul
- When the War Is Over
- A Death in the Desert
- The Dreamers
- The Wild Geese
- To the Face in the Mirror
- Turning
- The String
- Rain at Night
- Lark
- How It Happens
- Separation
- The Sound of the Light
- Walkers
- What Is Modern
- White Morning
- To the Words
- In the Open
- Little Horse
- The Notes
- In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year
- Empty Water
- Late Wonders
- Lives of the Artists
- Watchers
- How We Are Spared
- To the Hand
- The Child
- Losing a Language
- Foghorn
- Witness
- Late Spring
- Threshold
- It Is March
- Distant Morning
- The Master
- Utterance
- The Night Plums
- Division
- Completion
- The First Year
- The Dragonfly
- History
- Dead Hand
- To Age
- Spring
- The Singer
- What Can We Call It
- Words
- II
- Marfa, Texas
- III
- Rain Travel
- Note
- October
- The Time of Shadow
- My Other Dark
- Transit
- The Plaster
- Dew Light
- The Removal
- That Music
- Inheritance
- The Shipwreck
- Watchers
- Garden
- September
- The Gods
- The Arrival
- For a Coming Extinction
- A Debt
- The Unwritten
- Wanting to See
- A Door
- The Laughing Thrush
- The Heart
- The Wild
- Burning Mountain
- To Impatience
- The Poem
- Strawberries
- December Night
- Beginning
- First of June
- Dusk in Winter
- To the Margin
- The Herds
- Beginners
- Living with the News
- Unknown Bird
- The Mourner
- Waves in August
- Tale
- Returning Season
- Touching the Tree
- Search Party
- Leviathan
- This Time
- Going
- River Sound Remembered
- Tool
- The Search
- Some Last Questions
- Worn Words
- In Autumn
- Shore Birds
- The Piper
- Fate
- The Well
- World's End
- Daylight
- West Wall
- Looking for Mushrooms at Sunrise
- Homecoming
- Provision
- In a Clearing
- The Long and the Short of It
- Threshold
- For the Anniversary of My Death
- Antique Sound
- Before the Flood
- Plea for a Captive
- The Black Jewel
- Under the Day
- The Wakening
- In a Clearing
- Apparitions
- The Lovers
- The Wren
- Migration
- Left Open
- A Garden
- Passage
- Witness
- Turning
- In the Doorway
- IV
- Love Letters
- Notes
- About the Author
- Books by Victoria Chang
- Acknowledgments
- Copyright
- Special Thanks
