In her fifth book of poems, Victoria Chang mourns her mother’s death from pulmonary fibrosis and the disintegration of her father’s mind after a stroke, including his deteriorating ability to speak coherently. In effect, both parents are now lost to her. Philosophically, Chang shows her grasp of the fundamental paradox of human existence—given our mortal nature we are bound to suffer and die, yet our worth remains undiminished, a view not inconsistent with that of a Greek tragedian—minus a reverence for the gods. In the final pages of Obit, Chang’s resolution of the paradox seems a kind of imaginative catharsis—something beyond what Aristotle referred to as a “purgation”—an evocative engagement of both intellect and emotion.

Obit, then, is rooted in a rich blend of intellectual and cultural traditions reimagined by Chang’s agile mind as she questions the value of life in the face of inevitable death and suffering. Her willingness to play with and vary form is decidedly contemporary and postmodern, while her skepticism and sense of absurdity are essentially modern, seen for example when, with feigned childlike innocence, she expresses a desire to “complain to the boss of / God about God.” And her range of references stretches from the Parkland high school shooting to Ancient Greece, seen in this cryptic deconstruction of the Oedipus myth: “ here there are   no / Greek Gods     just     the spikey cries     of a baby and the / private legend       of her birth.” Oedipus translates as swollen foot, referencing his having been fastened by a spike to a mountainside as an infant, and symbolizing his, as well as humanity’s, innate vulnerability. Chang doesn’t elaborate, but the crying baby girl might be her mother, herself, a daughter—or any woman bound to suffer in “private,” unlike the more typical public fate (and cultural elevation) of male heroes.

 

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In Obit, Chang’s losses related to her mother and father cut deep, but she does not settle for easy answers to salve her pain:

Because after death there is no
moving on despite the people waving
us through the broken lights. There is
only a stone key that fits into one stone
lock. But the dead are holding the
key.

To comprehend her struggle with the weight of mortality, one must follow her path forward through the many ironic figures, rhetorical questions, paradoxes, and non sequiturs that embody her grief and sense of futility. For example, the earlier referenced complaint to “the boss of God” ends with “What if the boss of / God is rain and the only way to speak / to rain is to open your mouth to the sky / and drown?” Chang knows, science aside, there can be no completely satisfying explanation of the mystery and paradox of the ongoing cycle of life and death. In coping with the loss of a loved one, logic is of little comfort, and life may seem merely random: “Our air / goes in and out like silk in the folders / of the lungs. But breathing is a lucky / accident.”

The loss of two such powerful figures as parents brings into focus the prospect of her own eventual death, so that Chang can say at one point, “Death isn’t the enemy. Knowledge of / death is the enemy.” And elsewhere, while at a swimming pool, she designates her “breathing, between the splashes and / children laughing, no longer a miracle, / but simple mathematics.” Her mother was a mathematician, so not surprisingly Chang suggests that our allotment of breaths is a finite number, with each breath bringing us closer to the last one we will take. Rhetorically, this is a kind of reductio ad absurdum, since rationally we understand life can’t be fully lived fixated on its cessation, though that would require a tranquility not available to one who has just witnessed her mother’s death. For her, grief is “not a noun but a verb.” It follows her everywhere, tainting all she experiences, a heavy psychological burden.

The many prose poems of Obit are cast in the appearance of newspaper obituaries about the death of many things, from the concrete—her “father’s frontal lobe” and “her mother’s teeth”—to abstractions like friendship, civility, optimism, and, notably, America. Gradually, amid the accretion of images and figures, her life with her parents emerges. Chang’s relationship with her mother was difficult and exacerbated by the problem of taking care of Chang’s father. After her mother’s death, Chang had to contend with his mental decline without her. She recounts taking him shopping for pants:

He came out of the dressing room with
his pants on backwards. Two pockets
facing forward, like my mother’s eyes
mocking me, as if to say I told you so.
He was angry, pointing and cursing at
the chairs that no longer fit. I entered
the men’s dressing room and picked
up all the pants on the floor because
one of them had to be my father.

Chang’s devastation at losing her father to the dementia that eroded and then ended his ability to communicate deepens, at a visceral level, her recognition of the inherent limitations of language to completely capture the profound nature of human experience. Her compassion for her father’s state, coupled with the pain of his loss, however, grounds the scene’s irony, suggesting her strength to emerge from an exhausting period of mourning.

Still, in the above passage, imagining her mother’s criticism of her speaks to feelings of anger and guilt. Chang’s mother appears to have pushed her hard and applied a materialistic standard of judgment by which the poet may have felt devalued or, at the least, unappreciated. A lack of physical warmth between them seems especially problematic:

++++A photo shows my mother
holding my hand. I was nine. I never
touched her hand again. Until the day
before she died. I love so many things I
have never touched: the moon, a shiver,
my mother’s heart.

In spite of this, however, Chang was clearly devoted to her mother. On that day before her mother died, she “trimmed her nails one by one while the / morphine kept her asleep.” Contemplating the future without her, she offers this startling image:

The way grief is really about future
absence. The way the future closes
its offices when a mother dies. What’s
left: a hole in the ground the size of
violence.

No matter how complicated their relationship, her importance in Chang’s life is at the center of Obit.

To give the reader a different visual field and a variation in rhythm from the very dense prose poems, Chang strategically places tankas, two to a single page, at short intervals between the prose poems. Most are addressed to Chang’s two young daughters, as well as, she has said in an interview with Heidi Seaborn, to “children in general.”[1] The tankas are a shift to a more tender tone but maintain the complexity of the prose poems. In addition, she laments injustices, often framed as advice to her daughters about what they may encounter in life, Chang’s concerns with male dominance, prejudice and racism, and, at the very end of Obit, with school shootings.

This shift in focus is, psychologically, a breakthrough, a movement away from the most intensely introspective feelings about her parents. While death is still her concern—she admits her children too will die—hope also rises in these poems. In the tanka that ends section III, Chang adopts the role of a mother trying to teach her children the power of agency, a “yes” to their “no”: “I tell them they can. / But today, people were shot.” This is followed by the final obit prose poem dedicated to “America,” which she asserts “died on February 14, 2018.”  The day of the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida that left 17 dead, 14 of them teenagers.

Can there be a greater challenge to affirming the value of life and our ability to shape it meaningfully than the random slaughter of innocents? If Chang were less sure of her mature power as poet, or had less faith in the efficacy of imagination, she might not have included the Parkland tragedy. “America” brings together her mother and the dead children in a way that is simultaneously mournful and comforting. She says, “I imagine her touching / their hair. How she might tickle / their knees to make them laugh.” Mystery, paradox, existential pain—expressed compassionately, poetically—become cathartic. Readers need to experience the emotional catharsis of “America” for themselves. Chang’s gifted imagination, allied with her devotion to family, memorializes and preserves the spiritual bond with her mother and father, reflecting a wisdom about what unites all of us, the living and the dead. “The dead are an image of wind. And when / they comb their hair, our trees rustle.” What the heart feels and the intellect can conceive of, the imagination synthesizes into life that abides, where all is connected and humanity nurtured. What death may whisper to us about darkness and meaninglessness, the artist reshapes into a vision of moral order.

 

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Finally, Obit’s section II consists of six pages of linked unrhymed sonnets, introduced by the first line of Sylvia Plath’s “Nick and the Candlestick,” written as Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes was unraveling. In Plath’s poem, her infant child, like Chang’s daughters, also becomes an impetus for hope and revival, which sadly Plath was unable to maintain. In addition to referencing Plath in Obit, Chang also includes a passage from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves—showing her respect for two powerful women writers, who both succumbed to mental health issues. One senses from Chang’s general comments about her mother, beyond Obit, that she admired and perhaps absorbed her strength of will, the kind of mental toughness needed to survive the losses that accumulate in a lifetime. We need Victoria Chang’s strong voice, and her poetry deserves even more widespread attention and support. For just as the mouth can open wide to mourn in Obit, it also does this:

My children, children,
this poem will not end because
I am trying to
end this poem with hope hope hope,
see how the mouth stays open?

With the last words of Obit, paradox endures: How can a poem not end when it is ending? Perhaps when its truth is carried forward by a reader. That some people—young and old—experience life and death as unrelenting anguish is a harsh reality. Equally true is that when facing life’s most challenging moments, the compassion and wisdom of others, especially that of a writer like Chang, can comfort and reassure us of life’s worth.

 

[1] Seaborn, Heidi. “A Conversation with Victoria Chang.” The Adroit Journal, www.theadroitjournal.org/issue-thirty-one