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Details of Obit by Victoria Chang Book
- Book Name: Obit
- Authors: Victoria Chang
- Pages: 133
- Genre: Poetry
- Publish Date: Apr 7, 2020
- Language: English
Book review:
Obit by Victoria Changn this case it's america america died on february 14 2018 and my dead mother doesn't know since her death america has died a series of small deaths each one less precise than the next my tears are now shaped like hooks but my heart is damp still
If it is lucky it is in the middle of its beasts the unlucky dead children hold telegrams they must hand to a woman at a desk the woman will collect their belongings and shadows my dead mother asks each of these children
If they know me have seen me how tall my children are now they will tell her they once lived in florida not california she will see the child with the hole in his head she will blow the dreams out of the hole like dust
I used to think death was a kind of anesthesia now i imagine long lines my mother taking in all the children i imagine her touching their hair how she might tickle their knees to make them laugh the dead hold the other half of our ticket the dead are an image of wind
When they comb their hair our trees wrestle this poem changed me in two really interesting ways first as some of you know i co-edited along with brian clement and alexandra teague an anthology of poems about gun violence called bullets into bells in which we paired 50 poems with responses by people who had been active in the gun violence movement
who worked in some ways with people who had been victims of gun violence victoria's poem is a response to the shooting of the marjory stoneman douglas high school in parkland florida and so i have been intimately involved in the matrix of poetry and gun violence
victoria's poem is a fantastic addition to that troubling but important genre secondly i had also been thinking about the merging of personal and public tragedy my father died in 2017 and i was trying to write poems
In which his death and what i saw as the death of our country were somehow bleeding into each other victoria's poem is an amazing document in that it takes the obituary form and kind of merges the obituary and the elegy.
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