Tree of Knowledge: Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry 2026

by Victoria Chang

A poet watches the limbs of a eucalyptus tree get sawed the image persists, recurring across poems of art, language, selfhood, memory, and loss.

Joan Mitchell said, When I talk about love, I mean loving a tree. When I talk about love, I mean loving where a tree used to be.

Men assess the eucalyptus tree growing on the poet's street; a crane arrives. The sound of a chainsaw rings in the air and branches begin to fall. This tree-cutting haunts the poet, and refracts across the remarkable work collected in Tree of Knowledge as Chang turns her thoughts to artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell and Hilma af Klint.

Roving, evocative, and intricate, Tree of Knowledge is rooted in Victoria Chang's crystalline voice and generous, probing gaze, and by certain images ― trees, a hanging figure, a branch, fingertips, a briefcase ― that resurface like apparitions.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Aapi

168 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 9, 2026

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

[2raccoonsinacoat · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Tree of Knowledge” is a beautifully crafted and emotionally resonant collection that explores identity, loss, family, and Chang’s struggle with her own mind. Her writing is powerful and has such a quiet intensity that it’s impossible not to feel something.

Imagery of eucalyptus trees and the surrounding forests grounds the collection. I found these moments particularly evocative, but I struggled to fully grasp the deeper meanings of most of the poems.There are also themes of Chinese identity and cultural experience, complemented by mixed media elements, including photographs of rural Chinese communities. Again, the emotion was there and I really do appreciate Chang’s artistic range.

While I deeply admire the beauty of the language and the ambition here, I felt pretty distanced from its message. This could definitely just be a case of my own limited interpretive abilities, though. Still, this is a thoughtful and visually compelling work, and Chang is clearly a talented and impactful voice.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

[ReadinWithSteven · Rating 5 out of 5]

a perfect edition to the Chang catalogue. she might be at her most personal in this collection, allowing her distinct style to solidify and develop alongside her changing body and life. what works best in here is Chang's commitment to the trees, and some spine-chilling personifications that emotionally reached me, as well as her visual artworks and choices of poetic form. I tabbed so many pages and I was inspired every second I was reading.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victoria Chang is on a heater right now. And her books are beautiful objects.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Tree of Knowledge, Victoria Chang builds a collection in which image functions as both entry point and return. The book opens with an archival photograph, one of many threaded throughout, where the speaker declares, “I am borrowed, / a tax of / salt water and / sand. / A citizen of / injury” (“Woman in Eureka”), situating the work within inheritance and fracture.

From this origin, the felling of a eucalyptus tree becomes the collection’s central axis, its absence refracting across poems that engage art, language, and memory. Chang’s attention to perception grounds the work’s associative movement. In “Woman Writing,” she renders the imperceptible audible, insisting that “trees…begin to scream, little / vibrations we can’t hear,” a line that reorients the reader toward what lies beneath surface understanding.

“Eureka,” one of the collection’s most consequential poems, extends this inquiry into history, confronting the 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans with restraint that resists spectacle. The poem accumulates rather than resolves, allowing absence to remain visible.

While the collection’s recursive structure can at times feel abstract, its repetitions ultimately deepen its emotional and intellectual impact, returning the reader to the recognition that “No one tells you that suffering is a form” (“Red Tree, 1976”). For readers of contemporary poetry, Tree of Knowledge offers a rigorous, five-star experience, one that rewards close attention and lingers well beyond the final page.

[Brice Montgomery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victoria Chang's work has been such a balm since I first read Dear Memory and Obit years ago, and Tree of Knowledge is another achingly gorgeous addition to her canon.

In a way, if you've read one of Chang's books, you've read them all, but that's the point. She circles questions of death, memory, and the inadequacy of language in almost every project, and she's no closer to good answers for any of the problems that plague her.

What's truer to life than that?

For readers on Chang's wavelength, however, Tree of Knowledge will feel far from redundant. As with each of her books, she finds new ways to reiterate the impossibility of saying anything new. Her speaker enters into conversation with other artists—mostly visual—and grieves the fraying distinctions of easy binaries.

In "Self-Portrait," we read:

. . .Perhaps the
only thing we inherit is desire. And despair is just too
much desire.

Likewise, in "Red Tree, 1976," we see:

At least half of our grief for others is grieving
our own deaths. To acknowledge death too
often isn't too much grief. It's too much desire
to be commemorated.

These are poems with a palpable angst, and there's no catharsis for readers searching for an answer. For those who just wish to know others share their searching isolation, Tree of Knowledge will be a book to revisit again and again through every season.

[Mihiret · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victoria Chang's poetry collections are impressively different from each other--they even look different as bound collections because the form and shape of her poems change from volume to volume. The visual effect of the poem matters even if the poem appears at first glance to be a familiar column or collection of couplets. What they share is a a certain quiet willingness to sit with the problem (poetic, personal, or historic) and look at it from multiple angles, circling back and turning the idea or the image again. There are trees and their absences throughout all these poems, sometimes personally a mulberry tree that is present and absent, a whole tree, a dying tree, a stump, or a gap, and sometimes a multitude of tree like those bearing witness in the long poem "Eureka" which explores the 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, CA. There are also people and their absences (again personal losses, but also larger-scale historical losses). It's a collection that rewards rereading, for individual poems, for the resonances throughout the volume, and for the echoes readers will feel in their own lives.

Thanks to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for my free earc in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are all my own.

[Ally Ang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to FSG Books & NetGalley for the ARC.

"When I work on something now, I have // two things in mind. The first is to balance the living / and the dead. The second is to make it more alive." -"EUCALYPTUS, 1940"

This is, in my opinion, the best Victoria Chang book since Obit. The way Chang weaves together personal, historical, and natural (as in pertaining to nature) loss & memory is brilliant. Her reflections on aging, motherhood, and the long-term afterlife of grief were also quite moving. Chang is a poet I study when I'm having trouble ending a poem--I don't know how she does it, but she always writes these mic-drop poem endings that stop me in my tracks but don't feel overdetermined and still leave the door open to wonder and discovery. She is also a poet I turn to when I want to sharpen my relationship to image, both in the sense of ekphrasis and in the recurring images that haunt this book. I got a lot out of reading this book.

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to read more poetry so I was eager to read Tree of Knowledge by Victoria Chang because I’ve never read her books before and I loved this book! I loved the through line of trees in these poems. Some of the trees mentioned are hemlock and eucalyptus. I enjoyed how these poems connect with nature in a way that’s reflective. It was interesting the artwork included that was created by the author using historical photos and what looked liked mixed media. Artists are also referenced in these poems such as Rothko, Twombly and Hilma af Klint. Several lines stood out to me which I highlighted in the book and they provoked philosophical questions about the meaning of poetry and life. I especially loved the introspection of being Chinese. I’m very curious to read this author’s other books now!

Thank you to the publisher via NetGalley for my ARC!

[Emily Zhao]

A must-read if you like poetry and paintings, but as a person who tends to enjoy neither, this was sort of a miss for me 😅 but there were definitely a few poems that landed and I got to learn more about the 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans in Eureka, which I knew nothing about. Overall, I wish Chang provided a bit more context in her pieces, as I felt it would have strengthened my connection with her.


“Melancholy is to remember that the houses were wonderful even though the childhood wasn't. Depression is to remember that the houses and the childhood weren't wonderful, but to think they were.”

[Ambi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, this book blew me away! Victoria Chang’s poetry has a cyclical nature to it that draws you in deeper and deeper with each rotation. The way Chang can turn a single image into several vastly different poems is stunning. I particularly loved the artwork by the author, and if you also are an art lover, you will enjoy the references to paintings in many of her poems. Tree of Knowledge was a fantastic introduction to Chang’s work and I’m looking forward to picking up more of her poetry.

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC!

[Wendy Wisner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was blown away by this book. It consists mostly of ekphrastic poems and touches on themes of grief, parenting, lineage, intergenerational trauma, and midlife/menopause. What struck me is that as I was reading, each line felt completely fresh and surprising. I never knew where the poems were going to go and that truly took my breath away. The images and pathos in these poems are just so particular – imaginative, textured, evocative.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced reader copy.

[Dipali · Rating 4 out of 5]

** A copy of Is Tree of Knowledge was provided by the publisher and Net Galley in exchange for an honest review **

Victoria Chang remains one of my favourite poets and writers today. Tree of Knowledge is a beautiful collection of poetry about grief, trauma, loss, memory and identity. With every collection by Chang, not only do I feel a lot, I also end up learning so much about art and history.

[Sara Shocks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I underlined many lines! Not my favorite Chang in part because I was too lazy to look up the referenced paintings. Poems I starred while reading: "Trees [Studies], 1944," "Motherhood," "Woman in Blue," "Woman in Green," "Head of a Girl," "Mid Day," "Eureka," "Red Tree, 1976," "Tree of Knowledge, No. 7A," and "The Cloud of Unknowing, 2019"

[aims · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why does so much knowledge // come at the end of something?

Poems that open and open and open, demand a return, will lodge themselves in your mind if you permit. This book is Chang's ars poetica and ours: a tree with a heart in its center.

[Sarah Horner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victoria Chang is a fascinating thinker and that comes through so clearly in her poems. This collection is astonishing - I feel like I could spend an hour analyzing each individual poem, seeing where they lead me in my own creative practice. Will for sure be turning to these poems for inspiration.

[Michael Chowning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victoria Chang is a goddamn miracle.

[Mark Filipovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

see-through, separation, hand, unknotted, brooch, gone, formlessness, desire, hillside, dichroic

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible… spanning personal and diaspora history & grief. Spare and heavy. The future is blue-green and ruin…

[Alexa Harbaugh · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m actually astounded at how well liked this collection is

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review to follow

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeously written poetry collection largely written in response to specific works of art, which Chang also does transformative editing and poetry with. Recommended read in July.