With My Back to the World: Poems

by Victoria Chang

*Forward Book Prize for Best Poetry Collection
*Kingsley Tufts Book Award Finalist
*PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist
*California Book Award Finalist
*NPR Best Books of the Year
*Guardian Best Poetry Books of 2024
*LitHub Favorite Poetry Collections of the Year
*Electric Lit Best Poetry Collections of 2024
*A Today Show Pick
*Roxane Gay Audacious Book Club Selection
*Publisher's Weekly Starred Review and Top Ten Spring 2024 List
*Booklist Starred Review
*BookPage Starred Review

A new collection of poetry inspired by the work of Agnes Martin, exploring topics of feminism, art, depression, and grief, by the author of the prizewinning collection Obit.

Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square.

With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang’s new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.

Genres: Poetry, Art, Mental Health, Grief, Nonfiction, Feminism, Audiobook

112 pages, Hardcover

First published April 2, 2024

About the author

Victoria Chang's latest book of poems is With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Corsair in the UK), which received the Forward Prize in Poetry for the Best Collection. Her most recent book is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her prose book, Dear Memory, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. Her recent book of poems, OBIT, was published in 2020 by Copper Canyon Press. It was named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a TIME, NPR, Publisher's Weekly, Book of the Year. It received the LA Times Book Prize, the PEN Voelcker Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the NBCC, and long listed for the NBA. She is the Bourne Chair of Poetry and the Director of Poetry@Tech at Georgia Tech.

Her website is www.victoriachangpoet.com. Twitter: @VChangPoet.

Reviews

[Summer Connell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed and flew through the first half of this collection, but the last 50% felt very repetitive and dense. There were a few poems and lines that I really enjoyed, but for a lot of this one, I didn’t understand what the poems were saying (which doesn’t mean it’s not good poetry, just that that’s why it’s not a perfect collection for me personally). I did really appreciate the themes in this one and I enjoyed how this collection was based off of different artwork and how each piece of art was described.

Fave poems:
Untitled #3 1994, summer 1964, buds 1959, falling blue 1963.

Fave quotes:

“In this room, I’m trying to paint in lowercase. I am trying to draw a woman’s heartbeat, not the heart. “
- Aspiration, 1960

“depression is a group of parallel lines that want to touch, but never can.”
- untitled, 1961

“how even happiness is made by writing something down, then leaving it exposed for all to see. Is it possible to be seen, but not be looked at?”
- the island, 1961

“is it possible to feel happiness while on the line? Or is the present just the pointed tip of death’s sword?”
- drift of summer, 1964

“once I write the word depression, it is no longer myfeeling. It is now on view for others to walk toward, lean in, and peer at.”
- play, 1966

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victoria Chang said in an interview that “this book talks about “the inadequacies of language.”
And about Agnes Martin’s paintings: “I think that’s what really amazing art does. It’s like, this big door that everyone can enter. And no one owns that work.”

From the poem “On a Clear Day”: “Agnes said her grids came from the innocence of trees…”

A strong book of poetry that loves the art, depression, language, grief. Very worth reading

[Mya Matteo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This totally rocked my world. Everything shouldn't have worked for me (i don't like prose poems generally, or ekphrasis and I've literally never heard of the artist that this book is based on) but it blew my mind. bought a copy for my shelf, going to read again at some point and highlight to death.

"Tears do not come from the heart. They do not come from the eyes, or the body. They come from outside of us like time, from one large repository, which is why we cry when other people cry. In this way, tears are communal. We depend on each other for our sadness.” -- Summer, 1964

[Gregory Duke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A poetry that relies too much on overt terms (depression, sadness, grief) to affect and move and sway, but a poetry that deepens the reader/viewer's relationship with the referent (Agnes Martin) without relying entirely on ekphrasis.

[el · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was probably (slightly) too conceptual for my taste, without any language or emotional revelations above the plainspoken and the listlessly contemplative. in other words, not a lot for me to chew on. i enjoyed parts of "today," the poem "untitled #5, 1998," as well as "happy holiday, 1999." those three were my only notes in the positive.

most of the collection felt, for me, like this moment:

Maybe every poem is an attempt to describe lightning. Maybe lightning can't be described which is why there are so many poems.

indecisive? feeble? elementary? 2.7/5.

if you're a fan of the visual artist agnes martin, if you want to try something more abstract and ekphrastic for your next read, or if you're thinking about grief, aging, and beauty, you may have better luck with this book.

[Lily Poppen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love Chang’s work and also framing both the form and the examination of grief in conjunction with Agnes Martin’s paintings was incredible. Everything was clearly intentional, but some poems missed the mark for me while others were stand-outs. Usually am blown away by the overall effect of Chang’s work but this one left me wanting more.

[Sigrid A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Victoria Chang's poems are in response to the minimalist, gridlike paintings of Agnes Martin. Both artists seem to be using form to impose structure on reality. Most moving to me in these poems were Chang's images of depression as a physical object that she has to carry around with her, like a backpack.

"I stood behind the rope and felt the/melancholy of the room come out to greet my melancholy. I/was tempted to take its crudeness and divide it into rectangles./But the attendant told me that I needed to keep my depression/separate from the room's depression"

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Song, 1962
Even though I could multiply 48 by 8 to get 384 rectangles, I still counted them one by one. The first time, I counted 383, the second time 386, the third time and all the times after, I couldn't count past my age. Once in a museum, with my face an inch from Modigliani's portrait of Beatrice Hastings, a man ran up to me so fast, I only remember the way his hair smelled like incense. Stay one foot away please, he said. He was breathing so hard that I thought he knew that I had wanted to die just that morning. And that his hand touching my arm was meant to keep me from jumping off the balcony. When he left, I looked at the painting with the elongated thin nose, the distorted almond eyes, the orange-red cheeks and saw my own face, in fragments, on a pavement, looking up at the sky. And then it rained all the rumors off my face. And then the wind below everything but my expression away. (7)

from Untitled IX, 1982
The sayable, by nature, is an elegy. The unsayable, outside of time. What we say, here, now, is only the part of flesh that is known. (31)

Fiesta, 1985
Agnes said that painting is not about ideas or personal emotion, that the object is freedom. The 6 thicker lines seem to dominate, but it's the 12 thin lines between them that I can't stop looking at, because of their silence, their near disappearance. Yesterday, when I looked out the front window, I thought I saw a thick rope at the end of the driveway. When I looked again later, it was gone. Once something is written, it disappears. Before anything is written, it is completely possible. Once the line is drawn, the light narrows to a pinhole. What is art but trying to make something resemble what it was before it was made, when it was still unknown and free? The desire to draw a line is to ask a rhetorical question. All future lines are an attempt to answer that question. This year, I scribbled things down that I could read, that made sense to me, but no one else could understand. I wrote for an entire year and when I looked up, the ocean was dry, some men were signing more treaties, and the moon had been sold at auction. (37)

from Today
I walk into someone else's grief. It's
not that different from riding on a
bullet train. (50)

from Perfect Happiness (from Innocent Love Series, 1999)
Yesterday on a plane, we passed a cloud group as large as a city. Inside, every few seconds, lightning. I turned my neck as far as possible until I could no longer see it. I left my sight over there. I still see the lightning, even days later. On some nights, I am so below the line that I leave my breathing outside by accident. By the time I realize it, all the horses have taken my breathing and run off. For once, I am not being chased by my own language. The horses are surprised to have speech, but die within an hour of using it. (65)

Friendship, 1963
While I stared at the gold rectangles, two attendants talked about whether to work overtime and get paid time and a half. I wanted to tell them that there's no such thing as time, just time and a half. Sometime in the night, Etel Adnan had died. I had just seen her paintings the day before. The crowds were large and I wondered whether our looking had accelerated her death. When I took a photo of Agnes's piece, I saw my dark reflection on the gold. I started counting the grids but the bald man came up next to me. Suddenly there were two dark shadows on the gold. I asked him to step away but when he said, No, it was Agnes's voice. (98)

[Pais · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunningly beautiful collection of ekphrastic poetry that tackles themes around grief, loss, depression, family, and the limits of language.

This latest collection by Victoria Chang is inspired by, and in conversation with, the abstract minimalist art of Agnes Martin. Each poem takes its title from one of her paintings, and I found myself eagerly flipping between Google and each poem to explore the painting, then think about the connection between Martin's and Chang's pieces. Chang also prefaces some of the text poems with more avant-garde artistic treatments of her poem that you read on the following page, from blocking it into grids (like Agnes Martin), to drawing curlicue squiggles across the lines, to completely blacking it out. This added another dimension of appreciation for me.

Like so many good poems, these invite you to read and savor them one at a time, rather than quickly moving to the next. I found myself highlighting and annotating many lines to remember later. A few standout poems that I will return to again and again:


Buds, 1959
Grass, 1967
Falling Blue, 1963
The Tree, 1964
Fiesta, 1985
Today (a masterpiece of a long poem)
Untitled #5, 1998


Definitely check out this collection; it's short but packs a punch. Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Maggie Dunleavy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This autumn I am pledging myself to falling in love with poetry. This collection often felt engaging and beautiful and also at times a bit opaque or flat. I did really appreciate the themes of depression, grief, family, and what it feels like to engage with the portal/vortex of an artist’s work. Poetry is awesome get ready for me to be In My Poetry Zone everybody!!!!

[kaitlyn]

"I made an effort to unlove everyone but all I received were these lips, slightly / open... Even a woman's life is trying to / become more than the woman it represents." - untitled #10, 2002

"The birds tell me at . the gate that I will need to turn . in my attention . which I now know is the last nail that held . my heart in place . And on the other side . the hearts are no longer held up . lie on the ground . exposed . sunning like old medallions." - little sister

"What am I outside of language?... To think. everyone will write one final word." - gratitude, 2001

"Agnes said an artist needs to be / alone. What if I've spent my whole life wanting to be seen? .... Paint not the thing, but the effect it produces. I have wanted the sky all along, but my wanting was misplaced." - untitled #5, 1998

"So everyone dies more than once." - the beach, 1964

"We spend the day so close to each other's unhappiness that they began to smear together into a new form." - leaf in the wind, 1963

"I would never means you've / never had to do it."

---

Grief as a beached whale. Depression - trying to make sense of it. Trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. "There is even a difference between I and me. Tears never come out, but drip within the body. A small river forms and things begin to feel damp. The animals gather / around."

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blew my mind

[lauren ruiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to FSG & NetGalley for the copy! Victoria Chang never fails to stun me into disbelief. I remember years ago reading her 2020 collection, Obit, a sorrowful ode to her woes in the wake of her mother's passing. While With My Back to the World is comparably melancholic, its lamenting feels far more languid and almost unrelenting. There are still those tinges of grief that fray at the edges of her poetry, but depression this time around is more apparent, made sour by its unyielding pace, its unending drawl.

There's a need for realization in the world, for Chang to feel existent and understood by others outside of her own perceptions. In "Untitled #5, 1998", she writes:

"What if I've spent my whole life wanting to be seen? In that way, I've wanted to be the painting, not the painter. / But I am the painter. Even now, I walk outside at night just so the sky can see me one more time."

But there also seems to be this sense of inevitability in her poems, a teetering between surrendering to it or watching it play out from the sidelines. Like in "Play, 1996", she asks:

"Is it possible to write down how we feel without betraying our feelings? Once I write the word depression, it is no longer my feeling. It is now on view for others to walk toward, lean in, and peer at."

Constantly, I feel this slight of resignation in Chang's recent work. Her words have never felt gentle to begin with, but this time around, there's less of a fervor in her agony, and more of a submission to it that feels devotional. Something that Chang has always left me with is this sense that grief is so unselfish but also the most self-indulgent feeling we can have.

5/5 - every year with something new from Chang is a wonderful year

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IYcO...

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is no hope in shapes. There is just the line and the sound of its scratch as it crosses out memory. Perhaps it's not memory we're trying to capture but everything instead of it."

[Sagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection. These poems are in constant conversation with Agnes Martin's paintings and it's cool how Victoria uses those paintings as a springboard to launch her own ideas. I've never seen poetry do that before.

Each poem is named after an Agnes painting and it was fun to google the paintings while reading. Some poems are formatted in grids like the paintings which is cool. There are few line breaks in the poetry, most are blocks of text that look like prose. This isn't a bad thing, and I didn't mind it.

[Jed Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid collection that contains the utterly astounding poem, Today.

[S꩜phie · Rating 5 out of 5]

10/2/25 Reread because Victoria read at Vanderbilt!



11/3/24 So this is what good ekphrasis sounds like

[Ashley Moen · Rating 5 out of 5]

With My Back to the World ✨ Victoria Chang

This little lovely book has revived my love of poetry. I've loved poetry on and off for years, but as someone who never deeply studied poetry or has higher education in literature, I felt like I was never "smart enough" to "get" poetry, especially since even though I LOVE reading, I never did great in English class 😅

I felt like Chang had words for everyone in here and I loved the theme of art and words intertwining throughout the book.

I didn't understand everything, but thats why I love art: you take what you can from it, and everyone gets a little something different.

Definitely not the easiest place to start if you're new to poetry, but if you're a lover of art and beautifully written words, I'd definitely check this one out:)

Thank you @fsgbooks for this copy

[Caroline]

Untitled #9, 1995
y Victoria Chang

After Agnes Martin

Agnes only had nine years to live. The angels must
have begun to hover around her canvas like
monkeys. This canvas has nine white thin strips
between the red and blue ones. I’ve spent my life
thinking about the blue ones, thinking they were
the future. But the future was red all along. I sense
something is ending but I’m not sure what. Maybe
it’s the future. This morning, I looked at a large
spiderweb above my car. When I returned 10
minutes later, the weaver was gone, the web
dismantled, but my hands were still open. Maybe a
life doesn’t matter so much as the feeling it leaves
behind, whether anyone receives the feeling or not.
Maybe our goal is to spend all the light. Since
none of us asked to be born.

[M Delea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, which is divided into 3 sections. The first two focus on depression, language, and art (particularly the art of Agnes Martin) and the middle section is a long poem about her father’s dying and death.

Chang’s poems are not for everyone (I guess you can say this about every poet), but I like that she is always interesting and is willing to take risks. Not every poem lands with me, in that the images fall flat, but I still respect them.

Mostly, though, the poems are very strong. The poem about her father’s dying is tremendously moving.

Every poem is given a title of a Martin piece. Most are prose poems. For folks who suffer from depression (like me), there is much to relate to in this collection.

[Nuha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to FSG and NetGalley for the ARC.

Now available.

Deep and orderly, this ekphrastic poetry collection explores Agnes Martin's artwork. At the same time, Chang discusses the passing of her father, the recent rise of violence against Asian American women, and her own struggles with depression. The poems are transformative, starting at one place and shifting to another. I loved seeing the paintings intermix with Chang's own lines, the comparison of paint lines to the written lines.

[LX · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC to review!

3 stars!

I loved how this included some sort of mixed media for the poems before revealing them
Very different when used and I really liked it. The poems themselves weren't my taste hut I enjoyed the concept and execution.

[Elise · Rating 5 out of 5]

really unpromising inside jacket flap - a whole book about abstract paintings i've never heard of?! - but this is a remarkable collection of strangeness and reflection where the ideas are strong but the language links it all into holiness. great consistent tone throughout - i wouldn't expect anything less from Chang, whose OBIT is a similar single-work book.

[Bertha · Rating 4 out of 5]

“depression in my fingertips. It made my fingers tingle.
Sadness is the most alive emotion. It gets into your nerves. Its pulses feel like insects at the rim of your skin…I used to think depression was all around me, that I was within it. Now I see that it is always ahead of me. That it is in pieces, but it moves in a swarm.”

[Chanel Chapters]

There were a lot of numbers and shapes

[Sandra Del Rio]

perhaps language is ruin

[Kari · Rating 5 out of 5]

typical victoria chang. killing and rocking my world at once

[Aingeal Stone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since the death of my son I have been seeking comfort in grief poetry. I prefer Ullie Kaye and Whitney Hansen.

[Nat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cool idea but it got a bit repetitive. I think if I were more familiar with the artist she's referencing here, I would have enjoyed it more.