★ 12/18/2023

The painterly, meditative latest from Chang (after Circle) enters in a dialogue with the visual artists Agnes Martin and On Kawara. Martin’s grids and proclivity for numbers, divisions, and order encourage Chang toward quiet reflection, providing a container for sorrow: “all my/ thinking fits into/ boxes that can’t/ be opened”; “I stood behind the rope and felt the/ melancholy of the room come out to greet my melancholy.” Chang faces down solitude and the desire to be loved by complicating, and at times defying, those feelings: “we grow up thinking the future/ is possible, but soon realize we are estranged from it.” Discussions of art invite questions about being observed: “Is it possible/ to be seen, but not looked/ at?” Chang asks, intriguingly admitting, “I’ve wanted to be the painting, not the painter.” This collection is full of memorable insights as Chang experiments with erased and occluded work, all the while operating in the realm of feeling, where “desire is the only thing/ with nerve endings.” These elegiac poems thoughtfully balance the head and the heart. (Apr.)

Victoria Chang is continually expanding the possibilities of poetic form . . . [With My Back to the World] is an atmospheric landscape where borders dissolve: between speaker and artwork . . . between painting and language . . . between making and being observed. Visual art and poetry are intricately connected, and Chang shows us the skein.”

—Natasha Rao, The Rumpus

“A poignant, powerful poetry collection that uses the work of American abstract painter Agnes Martin to tackle themes of grief, loss, the loneliness of the human experience, yet also the hopefulness of the human experience, as well. You will find yourself underlining so many of Chang's beautiful verses, along with quietly smiling at her wit.”

—Isaac Fitzgerald (Today Show pick)

“The poems in Victoria Chang’s With My Back to the World explore unwelcoming metaphysical depths, fearlessly probing the self, existence, life, death, and depression. Her lyrical strategy . . . allows her to create a new space, a place where depression and grief can be accepted rather than rejected or stigmatized . . . [With My Back to the World] proffers a valuable invitation to readers to look at realms of the self that they would prefer to ignore.”

—Nicole Yurcaba, The Arts Fuse

“Chang thrives at embodying and vocalizing universal feelings of anxiety, joy, grief, fear, and wonder. Further, it’s as if readers of her poetry are invited to visit a theater designed to accommodate a form or tradition with which she is obsessed . . . [With My Back to the World] is fully engaged with Agnes Martin’s paintings, drawings, and writings . . . Chang expertly probes the limitations of art’s ability to offer comfort or satisfaction.”

—David Roderick, Poets & Writers

“[The poems of With My Back to the World] are resounding interactions between poet and painter. Chang’s distress not only permeates the scored rectangles of Agnes Martin’s canvas, but bleeds along its edges to saturate every poem . . . A multi-layered, complicated canvas where grief drawn onto a preconceived happiness illuminates a marked, nuanced expression of both, giving way to a reanimated artistry.”

—Kale Kim, International Examiner

“The magnetism of Chang’s language will convince you of the power of her project . . . Again and again, there’s the moment of recognition that readers come to poetry for: Here is a feeling you know well, but have never been able to witness outside of yourself. Isn’t it liberating to put these words to it? Don’t you feel less alone in your loneliness?”

—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, BookPage (starred review)

“Painterly, meditative . . . Full of memorable insights as Chang experiments with erased and occluded work, all the while operating in the realm of feeling, where ‘desire is the only thing / with nerve endings.’ These elegiac poems thoughtfully balance the head and the heart.”

—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

"Victoria Chang's lucid and playful poetry surprised and moved me with its friendly abundance of Koanlike lines—stimulating yet calming news from the dreamy outskirts of human consciousness."

—Tao Lin, author of Leave Society

“In Agnes Martin’s grid paintings, each pale rectangle can feel like an hour, a day, or a year. The effect of all these small variations seen at once approximates the overwhelming fact of other lives. With My Back to the World gives Victoria Chang that same kind of quiet, intimate, constrained but infinite room to work in. This book is the record of an artful, attentive mind, full of startling insights (“My solitude is like the grass. I become so aware of its presence that it too begins to feel like an audience”), a testament to care, integrity, and persistence.”

—Elisa Gabbert, author of Normal Distance

06/01/2024

In her first volume of poetry after the Anisfield-Wolf Award-winning OBIT, Chang deftly embodies the anomie and emptiness that is depression via a considered look at the artwork of minimalist painter Agnes Martin, having been commissioned by New York's Museum of Modern Art to write a poem about Martin's "On a Clear Day" print series. Martin's carefully crafted grids are fitting emblems of the poet's reduced state, her boxed-in, fragmented interior life. While "On a Clear Day, 1973" commemorates the eight people (including six Asian women) killed in the 2021 Atlanta shootings, and a middle section inspired by conceptual artist On Kawara elegizes her father, Chang focuses not on roots but affect ("wandering itself is depression" as we try to locate it) and the inarticulate, unfathomable ever-presentness of mental health crisis. Friendship becomes just "cut flowers. Dissertations / on misunderstanding" and looking back shows that "all we / remember are / the equal and / divided / sadnesses," as exemplified by Martin's rectangles." VERDICT Though Chang finally concedes that "My error was to become what / I wanted to be, not its tone," there's no easy understanding here. She's grappling, and readers will too, but her refusal to trade in cliché makes this book stand out.