Chang’s father, whose dementia has eroded his capacity to string together words, floats through the collection and can be read as Chang’s poetic avatar, a macabre embodiment of a person unwilling to put up with their speechlessness. Obit revolves around the August 2015 passing of Chang’s mother, but it is her father, specifically her father’s “Frontal Lobe,” that gets the first obituary in the collection. By killing herself multiple times, Chang exercises authorial control as well as a literary ego death, writing out of life’s endpoint rather than driving towards it.

Chang tackles grief by composing obituary after obituary, and Obit reckons with death by swimming inside it: mother, father, the self, relationships, logic, time, and memory all die and are obituarized. Chang fills out skinny, journalistic blocks of prose poetry as launchpads to perform a kind of “memory care” for her parents while also being aware that transcribing such grief into words is utterly impossible. “As if strangers could somehow care for his memory.” Chang attempts to access lost familial memory in Obit, a series of poetic obituaries composed as Chang grieves for her dead mother-and for the myriad deaths that followed her mother’s passing. “We moved him upstairs to memory care,” Victoria Chang writes in her new poetry collection Obit, speaking of her father, who suffers from dementia.

Obit by Victoria Chang