Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang’s latest book of poems, OBIT, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her previous, Barbie Chang, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017. The Boss (McSweeney’s) won a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Other books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches within Antioch’s MFA Program.
Reading List
Obit
Gait—my father’s gait died on March 14, 2011. Once erect, light, flat-footed. Magnificent. Now, his gait shuffles like sandpaper. Once my father erected a basketball net, mounted it onto a wooden pole from the lumberyard to save money. With each shot, the pole moved a little, invisible to the eye, until I had to shoot […]
Obit
My Mother’s Lungs—began their dying sometime in the past. Doctors talked around tombstones. About the hedges near the tombstones, the font. The obituary writer said the obituary is the moment when someone becomes history. What if my mother never told me stories about the war or about her childhood? Does that mean none of it […]