What do you think?
Rate this book
The Trees Witness Everything
In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” each poem is shaped by pattern and count. This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name―with reverence, economy, and whimsy―the ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.
125 pages, Paperback
First published April 26, 2022
70 people are currently reading
3040 people want to read
About the author
Victoria Chang
29 books425 followersVictoria 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.
Her website is www.victoriachangpoet.com. Twitter: @VChangPoet.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 208 reviews
![Profile Image for s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all].](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.gr-assets.com%2Fimages%2FS%2Fcompressed.photo.goodreads.com%2Fusers%2F1735525095i%2F6431467._UX200_CR0%2C11%2C200%2C200_.jpg&w=128&q=75)
April 10, 2024
‘There is a bird and a stone in your body. Your job is to not kill the bird with the stone’
Victoria Chang is full of magical surprises. Her recent collections have taken unique approaches to topics of grief and remembrance, such as Obit constructed through poetic obituaries to various words and ideas or Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief, a moving collage of poetry, letters and photographs. Her latest, The Trees Witness Everything, continues her elegiac poetry towards the death of her mother and the slow dying of the Earth. Here, however, she has imposed artistic rules and restrictions, written in various Japanese syllabic forms called wakas and each titled after poems by W.S. Merwin and responding to said titles. They are short and to the point, yet pierce right into your heart as she examines ideas of grief for loved ones, be them human, animal or landscapes, as well as stunning meditations on poetry and the cycles of life amidst all the sorrows and joys the world immerses us in. These are brilliant, tiny explosions of emotion that thrive under Chang’s artistic self-regimentation, poetry merging with the natural world—especially trees—and each of Chang’s words digs up life to uncover a somber beauty within.
PASSAGE
Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place—
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?
In the notes following the poetry, Chang quotes fellow poet Terrance Hayes saying ‘my relationship to form is that of a bird inside of a cage, moving around.’ This spirit is embodied in the way Chang so deftly moves within her imposed forms, which she describes as taking a title from a Merwin poem and then choosing a syllabic form at random for her own poem. In this way we can almost feel the art of creation on the page, and as the book is published uniquely as a tall, very thin book, this also constrains the lines which have at most 6 or 7 words each. There are also only two poems per page, like a sort of call and response (aside from the one long poem, the 15 page Marfa, Texas, or the final section, Love Letters consisting of a barrage of 3-line poems). Merwin is an interesting choice, and poet Jennifer Chang theorizes in a review by way of conversation with Dean Rader for an LA Review of Books article that the homage may stem from Merwin having been a major source of Asian poetry translations. Victoria Chang herself notes that she ‘selected Merwin’s titles because of how open they seem,’ and in this openness she manages to create conversation between his and her work. Often her poems are not actually responses to his poems themselves but to the title, the crack in the wall through which both poets’ beautiful discourse flows outward.
CONVENIENCE
Youth stretches over
everything, can be used once.
Then we turn it inside out.
The passage of time is always felt through these brief poems, chronicling the moments that make up a life and the turning of seasons. ‘Someone is turning / the earth with wrenches, each turn / a bit closer to the end.’ Time is the great eroder of all, we see, and Chang finds this both tragic and beautiful all at once. ‘Sadness takes time,’ she writes, with grief always ready to intrude into her works, ‘sadness / is made up of minutes. Hope / is made up of years.’ I am in awe at the way Chang blends the cycle of human emotions—going from hopeful to sad to joy around and around feeling all our feelings as the days march on—with the cycle of seasons, folding our lives into being of the Earth. Yet there is also resistance against being caught in a cycle: ‘I am still angry / with God and all the patterns / we’re forced to follow’
While these poems are all very brief without often being a deep enough recess of feeling to be a foothold in the collection, it embodies the way passing moments and feelings are—in the grand scheme of things—rather brief and the beauty of this collection comes from the amalgamation of the poems.
HOMECOMING
The birds come back
but they don't tell us stories.
Their wings remember nothing,
are never knowledge.
We don't remember our birth
When a mother dies, it's gone.
Grief is everywhere in this collection. There is discussion of war and its endless repetitions (‘war is never by / itself, just like laughter or / snow’), of death, and of the ways we harm the natural world. Chang pays special attention to the ways we cause destruction for personal gain and grieves that our success as a species was at the expense of the Earth rather than looking for more sustainable methods or living in better harmony, such as in the poem Tool:
We make tools to fix
everything—hammers, nails, wires
that we twist to hold
down or bend into beauty.
We make a small tree
into the shape we want, to
be slanted, silent.
The wire on my wrists cut in,
I take the shape of desire.
Yet this isn’t to say it is a dark and gloomy collection. There are humorous witticisms and often a great deal of hope. ‘Hope has footprints too,’ she writes, ‘some days we follow it. / some days it follows us.’
TRANSIT
What are words but lies?
A footnote has lost is thought.
Have you ever been
so afraid of desire, you
wished for yourself to die first?
I appreciate how much this collection engages with the act of poetry itself, or the existence of the poet. The speaker is always right there on the page, musing along with thoughts like ‘A poem is published / it is posted everywhere. / A tree drops leaves in secret.’ I feel a really personal connection with these from having spent a few years secretly leaving poems all over my town on trees. I always love a good tree poem because of it and this collection is full of them, but I also tended towards short poems one could quickly read but spend the day mulling over. So this is like the ideal collection for me in that way.
TO THE MARGIN
I will never love
anyone the way I love
my memories and their cliffs
Victoria Chang’s The Trees Witness Everything is a superb little collection of passing poems and moments like catching rays of light shimmering off a pond. While this one might be sometimes too weightless to really stick, I am always marveling at her creativity and enjoy seeing how well she flourishes creating unique projects such as this.
4.5/5
‘I struck a bargain
with language. That I would not
abuse or sell it, that
I would use it for
beauty. In exchange, I will
die, while words live forever.’
Victoria Chang is full of magical surprises. Her recent collections have taken unique approaches to topics of grief and remembrance, such as Obit constructed through poetic obituaries to various words and ideas or Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief, a moving collage of poetry, letters and photographs. Her latest, The Trees Witness Everything, continues her elegiac poetry towards the death of her mother and the slow dying of the Earth. Here, however, she has imposed artistic rules and restrictions, written in various Japanese syllabic forms called wakas and each titled after poems by W.S. Merwin and responding to said titles. They are short and to the point, yet pierce right into your heart as she examines ideas of grief for loved ones, be them human, animal or landscapes, as well as stunning meditations on poetry and the cycles of life amidst all the sorrows and joys the world immerses us in. These are brilliant, tiny explosions of emotion that thrive under Chang’s artistic self-regimentation, poetry merging with the natural world—especially trees—and each of Chang’s words digs up life to uncover a somber beauty within.
PASSAGE
Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place—
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?
In the notes following the poetry, Chang quotes fellow poet Terrance Hayes saying ‘my relationship to form is that of a bird inside of a cage, moving around.’ This spirit is embodied in the way Chang so deftly moves within her imposed forms, which she describes as taking a title from a Merwin poem and then choosing a syllabic form at random for her own poem. In this way we can almost feel the art of creation on the page, and as the book is published uniquely as a tall, very thin book, this also constrains the lines which have at most 6 or 7 words each. There are also only two poems per page, like a sort of call and response (aside from the one long poem, the 15 page Marfa, Texas, or the final section, Love Letters consisting of a barrage of 3-line poems). Merwin is an interesting choice, and poet Jennifer Chang theorizes in a review by way of conversation with Dean Rader for an LA Review of Books article that the homage may stem from Merwin having been a major source of Asian poetry translations. Victoria Chang herself notes that she ‘selected Merwin’s titles because of how open they seem,’ and in this openness she manages to create conversation between his and her work. Often her poems are not actually responses to his poems themselves but to the title, the crack in the wall through which both poets’ beautiful discourse flows outward.
CONVENIENCE
Youth stretches over
everything, can be used once.
Then we turn it inside out.
The passage of time is always felt through these brief poems, chronicling the moments that make up a life and the turning of seasons. ‘Someone is turning / the earth with wrenches, each turn / a bit closer to the end.’ Time is the great eroder of all, we see, and Chang finds this both tragic and beautiful all at once. ‘Sadness takes time,’ she writes, with grief always ready to intrude into her works, ‘sadness / is made up of minutes. Hope / is made up of years.’ I am in awe at the way Chang blends the cycle of human emotions—going from hopeful to sad to joy around and around feeling all our feelings as the days march on—with the cycle of seasons, folding our lives into being of the Earth. Yet there is also resistance against being caught in a cycle: ‘I am still angry / with God and all the patterns / we’re forced to follow’
While these poems are all very brief without often being a deep enough recess of feeling to be a foothold in the collection, it embodies the way passing moments and feelings are—in the grand scheme of things—rather brief and the beauty of this collection comes from the amalgamation of the poems.
HOMECOMING
The birds come back
but they don't tell us stories.
Their wings remember nothing,
are never knowledge.
We don't remember our birth
When a mother dies, it's gone.
Grief is everywhere in this collection. There is discussion of war and its endless repetitions (‘war is never by / itself, just like laughter or / snow’), of death, and of the ways we harm the natural world. Chang pays special attention to the ways we cause destruction for personal gain and grieves that our success as a species was at the expense of the Earth rather than looking for more sustainable methods or living in better harmony, such as in the poem Tool:
We make tools to fix
everything—hammers, nails, wires
that we twist to hold
down or bend into beauty.
We make a small tree
into the shape we want, to
be slanted, silent.
The wire on my wrists cut in,
I take the shape of desire.
Yet this isn’t to say it is a dark and gloomy collection. There are humorous witticisms and often a great deal of hope. ‘Hope has footprints too,’ she writes, ‘some days we follow it. / some days it follows us.’
TRANSIT
What are words but lies?
A footnote has lost is thought.
Have you ever been
so afraid of desire, you
wished for yourself to die first?
I appreciate how much this collection engages with the act of poetry itself, or the existence of the poet. The speaker is always right there on the page, musing along with thoughts like ‘A poem is published / it is posted everywhere. / A tree drops leaves in secret.’ I feel a really personal connection with these from having spent a few years secretly leaving poems all over my town on trees. I always love a good tree poem because of it and this collection is full of them, but I also tended towards short poems one could quickly read but spend the day mulling over. So this is like the ideal collection for me in that way.
TO THE MARGIN
I will never love
anyone the way I love
my memories and their cliffs
Victoria Chang’s The Trees Witness Everything is a superb little collection of passing poems and moments like catching rays of light shimmering off a pond. While this one might be sometimes too weightless to really stick, I am always marveling at her creativity and enjoy seeing how well she flourishes creating unique projects such as this.
4.5/5
‘I struck a bargain
with language. That I would not
abuse or sell it, that
I would use it for
beauty. In exchange, I will
die, while words live forever.’
May 8, 2022
The Arrival
It is winter but
the poets are still coming.
I once lived in a
town where there were no poets
or children. The trees
were made of salt. When the wind
shook, nothing happened
but daylight.
There were no hands
since there was nothing to take.
Written in Japanese poetic forms known as wakas, The Trees Witness Everything uses precise syllabic count to free the poet's mind, a reverse psychology that results in breathing, breathtaking poems.
In The Open
Weather is wet, it
doesn't have joints. How snow just
becomes rain, what's that
change called. Trees witness everything,
but they always look away.
Isolation, in the ways it gives us moments of keen observation and inner stillness, and how within it our deepest griefs and regrets surface, is a constant theme of this collection. Horses, birds and trees are motifs that represent, in literal, fabulist or allegorical ways, the ways our bodies age, the earth betrays us, and mothers die.
Homecoming
The birds come back
but they don't tell us stories.
Their wings remember nothing,
are never knowledge.
We don't remember our birth
When a mother dies, it's gone.
While so much contemporary poetry urgently conveys identity and issues and intently pursues embittered conversation, Chang turns to the interior and speaks quietly, with minimal words and resonant sounds. I will remember and return to her work long after the clamor of the activists has been borne away on the wind.
I have to mention the design of this collection: the book is half-width, fitting the brief size and structure of the poems. As beautiful, resonant, delicate, and somber as these poems are, the neon orange cover and digital all-caps font are hideous. Jarring. I'm fascinated by the "why" of the design; certainly it's arresting. For its words and inspiration, I want to leave The Trees Witness Everything on the coffee table, to be picked up and read at random in moments when my own words fail me. But it will always lay beneath other books.
Full disclosure: I work for Copper Canyon Press, the publisher. All opinions, clearly, are my own.
It is winter but
the poets are still coming.
I once lived in a
town where there were no poets
or children. The trees
were made of salt. When the wind
shook, nothing happened
but daylight.
There were no hands
since there was nothing to take.
Written in Japanese poetic forms known as wakas, The Trees Witness Everything uses precise syllabic count to free the poet's mind, a reverse psychology that results in breathing, breathtaking poems.
In The Open
Weather is wet, it
doesn't have joints. How snow just
becomes rain, what's that
change called. Trees witness everything,
but they always look away.
Isolation, in the ways it gives us moments of keen observation and inner stillness, and how within it our deepest griefs and regrets surface, is a constant theme of this collection. Horses, birds and trees are motifs that represent, in literal, fabulist or allegorical ways, the ways our bodies age, the earth betrays us, and mothers die.
Homecoming
The birds come back
but they don't tell us stories.
Their wings remember nothing,
are never knowledge.
We don't remember our birth
When a mother dies, it's gone.
While so much contemporary poetry urgently conveys identity and issues and intently pursues embittered conversation, Chang turns to the interior and speaks quietly, with minimal words and resonant sounds. I will remember and return to her work long after the clamor of the activists has been borne away on the wind.
I have to mention the design of this collection: the book is half-width, fitting the brief size and structure of the poems. As beautiful, resonant, delicate, and somber as these poems are, the neon orange cover and digital all-caps font are hideous. Jarring. I'm fascinated by the "why" of the design; certainly it's arresting. For its words and inspiration, I want to leave The Trees Witness Everything on the coffee table, to be picked up and read at random in moments when my own words fail me. But it will always lay beneath other books.
Full disclosure: I work for Copper Canyon Press, the publisher. All opinions, clearly, are my own.
April 27, 2022
The economy of words to gut punch ratio is mathematically astounding. Favorites included: “There is a bird and a stone in your body. Your job is to not kill the bird with the stone.” And the line “Why can we love, then undo it?”
February 1, 2025
“Let me tell you a story / about hope: it always starts / and ends with birds”
i want to tattoo every single poem in this book right onto my skin so i can read them every day of my life
July 9, 2022
Victoria Chang uses constraint in this collection, through Japanese forms. Admittedly, this isn't my favorite type of poetry book to read, one where the theme is found more in form than content. So I did read it over a period of months, as opposed to the way I would quickly read a more content-themed collection. Not a complaint, though! I'm definitely on a short poem kick and individually, the pieces are strong, moving, thought-provoking, worth revisiting, and make the book easy to dip into here and there.
July 27, 2023
I just didn’t connect with any of the poems.
August 10, 2024
When I first met her, I thought “she’s a genius, her mind is exquisite, and her face should be printed on our money.” I still think that, but I feel the same way about this collection as I did about Hayes’ past/future sonnets: an abundance of short poems, some of which are solemnly inventive in imagery and thought, soberly insightful, and searing in their loneliness, but also many of which are just OK. A book of good-to-adequate poems (mixed in with several gems) from Chang is still stocked with great surprise and great learning — this isn’t her floor, and even the floor of her writing would loom above the ceilings of some others — but reading did feel like I was stubbornly digging into a tub of ice cream, searching for the next surprise of a cookie dough or cheesecake chunk. Once you’ve heard “We Belong Together” and “Fantasy,” you’re less enthused about the several deep cut album tracks at the concert, though of course no one’s *truly* complaining because it’s still Mariah Carey live. Regardless, Chang continues to excite with surreal, multisensory details that are imagined and observed to the point of an almost microscopic synesthesia. The in-book-universe’s rules of (nonlinear) time, the speaker’s awareness of that time, and the personification of nature are intriguingly fluid and perplexing here, and the collection writ large captivates the reader in its own sort of calming psychological world-bubble, much the same way a planetarium’s interior submerges a viewer in wonder and starlight. Her voice has the clarity and texture of someone who has spent all of their slept hours cartographing lucid dreams. I also acknowledge that I am perhaps not the ideal reader for (these) more abstract, quiet poems — which is fine. I remain an admirer of her mind. Inshallah she will live to 120, win the lottery twice, and write many more books
May 2, 2022
I look at my hands,
watch how they bend, just like air,
can sit still like ice,
the small lines at the knuckles,
how they can drag hair,
or cover a woman’s mouth. I should have kept the
ashes of her hands to see
whether they could still be held.
Notes: “A bird in a cage, moving around,” indeed! This collection’s language and themes are taut and beautiful. Many of the katautas (5-7-7) knocked me down:
Some days I can’t see
beyond the two small lemons
as they pull down the branches.
Or:
A church is empty.
Where are all the secrets?
Under the pew is a plum.
A favorite sedoka (a double katauta, so to speak):
The lemons are gone,
someone picked them off the tree.
They have grown too fast like hope.
My fingerprints are
all rubbed down from touching time.
Soon I will have lived enough.
And a favorite nine-liner:
This March is made of
winter and eighty-five days.
The month is bloodshot.
April should be the cruelest
month, but they are all
cruel in their inch-by-inch strike.
I take March off,
put September on like a shirt.
The months fit better than days.
The longer, freer sections stagger, too:
The older I get, the more I love windows, with their mornings and evenings.
Just killer.
watch how they bend, just like air,
can sit still like ice,
the small lines at the knuckles,
how they can drag hair,
or cover a woman’s mouth. I should have kept the
ashes of her hands to see
whether they could still be held.
Notes: “A bird in a cage, moving around,” indeed! This collection’s language and themes are taut and beautiful. Many of the katautas (5-7-7) knocked me down:
Some days I can’t see
beyond the two small lemons
as they pull down the branches.
Or:
A church is empty.
Where are all the secrets?
Under the pew is a plum.
A favorite sedoka (a double katauta, so to speak):
The lemons are gone,
someone picked them off the tree.
They have grown too fast like hope.
My fingerprints are
all rubbed down from touching time.
Soon I will have lived enough.
And a favorite nine-liner:
This March is made of
winter and eighty-five days.
The month is bloodshot.
April should be the cruelest
month, but they are all
cruel in their inch-by-inch strike.
I take March off,
put September on like a shirt.
The months fit better than days.
The longer, freer sections stagger, too:
The older I get, the more I love windows, with their mornings and evenings.
Just killer.
December 26, 2023
I was so pleasantly surprised by this collection of Japanese wakas. I don’t think other authors could get away with the philosophical tone, but I found it to work as a whole collection , though im not sure I’d be as impressed with these poems on their own.
June 30, 2022
Preciós. Forma rigorosa. Contingut intel·ligent.
December 22, 2024
A strong, beautiful collection. I cannot wait to read more from Victoria Chang.
September 11, 2022
Got chills
July 1, 2022
This book is a beautiful example of how formal constraint can elevate language to new levels. I wish I could carry each of these perfectly compressed poems in my pockets and pull one out whenever I need a moment of inspiration, but alas, I’ll just have to keep this book on hand for the rest of my life. Highly recommend.
November 9, 2022
I've run into this book in the Dox Museum of modern art in Prague and I immediately grabbed it and I am glad I did. A short and beautiful read that makes you think if you react to poetry, or haiku, that way. Which is the purpose, to reflect on the words and Victoria Chang wrote them so beautifully.
March 18, 2023
damn that’s crazy
Read
April 5, 2025Wow. Forms abound, and Chang abides by them to astonishing effect. Mourning gains a glancing tendency when told through the elaborate discipline of the Japanese waka, yet also along the strong, familiar flow of the English vernacular. Often, grief hides behind formal partitions, thresholds, and columns, and asserts itself only through Chang’s plain, plaintive records of the laws of a strange new nature. Or perhaps not so new, but just reoriented in a perceptual world altered by grief. Chang’s observations establish a world of correspondences, wherein, say, the anchor draws up language; language lives in distant mountains; cliffs are formations of memory; memory is dispersed by birds; birds leave scars in the sky, then “starts and ends” every iteration of “a story about hope” (“Love Letters”).
New relationalities precipitate from Chang’s spare, sweeping reconsideration of how the world behaves, when all of its parts and ideas have been steeped through with the central absence of the collection. “Once my heart sat inside the bell. It rang only when something touched it. Lately every / shadow is my dead mother. Lately the bell rings all the time but the bell is empty… / …Is it possible / to stop loving everything? The owl. The hawk. Every person I meet. To see everyone as my mother” (“Marfa, Texas”). The mother has passed, but she is reborn into the topos through which the poems journey, at once watchful yet with their eyes closed.
New relationalities precipitate from Chang’s spare, sweeping reconsideration of how the world behaves, when all of its parts and ideas have been steeped through with the central absence of the collection. “Once my heart sat inside the bell. It rang only when something touched it. Lately every / shadow is my dead mother. Lately the bell rings all the time but the bell is empty… / …Is it possible / to stop loving everything? The owl. The hawk. Every person I meet. To see everyone as my mother” (“Marfa, Texas”). The mother has passed, but she is reborn into the topos through which the poems journey, at once watchful yet with their eyes closed.
August 3, 2023
Hope, Victoria Chang writes, "starts and ends with birds." Dickinson's "Hope is a thing with feathers," comes to mind when I read the last poem in Chang's collection of shorter poems, all written in various Japanese forms called wakas. As someone who writes haiku, I really appreciated this collection. They read like daydreams rooted in nature, with images of trees and leaves and many times, birds. Many of the poems ruminate on time, mortality and love in ways. They read almost like passing thoughts while in a liminal space: in the shower, driving, walking outside. Chang takes familiar aspects of our environments like trees and uses them to question what we call familiar in the poems. It is lovely. Read this while staring up at trees, imagining that the branches are your entire world. Pay special attention to the birds.
December 30, 2024
A poem is published.
It is posted everywhere.
A tree drops leaves in secret.
*
To have a heart like this is to be made of midnight. There are always too many questions to ask and not enough time. To love so much is to live within birds. I have been waiting for this heart to fade or at least to kneel. The heart is not inside us but we are inside it.
*
TO THE RAIN
You seem so happy.
If I could be your pupil,
I would sit in front.
Please teach me how to collapse,
the way your legs break
and then spread, how you let go,
flow this way and that,
take the form of everything,
even tighten in my mouth.
*
Why can we love, then undo it?
*
If you don’t forgive yourself,
tomorrow will still arrive. So you
might as well forgive yourself.
*
There is a bird and a stone
in your body. Your job is not
to kill the bird with the stone.
It is posted everywhere.
A tree drops leaves in secret.
*
To have a heart like this is to be made of midnight. There are always too many questions to ask and not enough time. To love so much is to live within birds. I have been waiting for this heart to fade or at least to kneel. The heart is not inside us but we are inside it.
*
TO THE RAIN
You seem so happy.
If I could be your pupil,
I would sit in front.
Please teach me how to collapse,
the way your legs break
and then spread, how you let go,
flow this way and that,
take the form of everything,
even tighten in my mouth.
*
Why can we love, then undo it?
*
If you don’t forgive yourself,
tomorrow will still arrive. So you
might as well forgive yourself.
*
There is a bird and a stone
in your body. Your job is not
to kill the bird with the stone.
September 11, 2022
these are poems i want to memorize and repeat to myself on the lake. i want to read more form poetry now!
some favorites: turning, far along in the story, to the face in the mirror, invocation, rain light, snowfall, green fields, strawberries, tale, search party, homecoming, apparitions, the lovers.
Tale:
She is beautiful,
the workmanship of her fur.
When I think of her,
my body aches in small lights.
I want to be where
the owl is from, where a year
is four thousand days,
where there are no more countries,
where everyone gets away.
Turning:
My mother is dead.
The lemons still turn yellow,
the trout still stare emptily,
desire is still free.
We still love many people,
eat peaches as if kissing.
some favorites: turning, far along in the story, to the face in the mirror, invocation, rain light, snowfall, green fields, strawberries, tale, search party, homecoming, apparitions, the lovers.
Tale:
She is beautiful,
the workmanship of her fur.
When I think of her,
my body aches in small lights.
I want to be where
the owl is from, where a year
is four thousand days,
where there are no more countries,
where everyone gets away.
Turning:
My mother is dead.
The lemons still turn yellow,
the trout still stare emptily,
desire is still free.
We still love many people,
eat peaches as if kissing.
January 25, 2023
“Don’t worry. The sky isn’t really a hand. It isn’t waiting to punch you down.” ARE YOU KIDDING ME. Ugh I knew this would be good because Objt banged but Victoria Chang’s mind is expansive and powerful and she really understands the power of words. Go off.
March 14, 2023
“…there’s just a / clothesline with half a life clipped / on it, drying in the sun.”
Victoria Chang’s poetry never misses, honestly. I am so blown away that I don’t have much words to describe it, other than I always feel as if I understand — myself, the world — after reading her poems.
Victoria Chang’s poetry never misses, honestly. I am so blown away that I don’t have much words to describe it, other than I always feel as if I understand — myself, the world — after reading her poems.
December 31, 2024
I’m so so glad to have closed 2024 with this, every last page resonated with my heart. Almost felt like the soul of this book is from the big sister I never had—telling me things to watch out from within.
January 10, 2025
Achingly raw and beautiful. I'm so inspired by all of the different textures Chang manages to layer within the constraints of prompt and form. It's so heavy with grief but light with hope.
"Let me tell you a story
about hope: it always starts
and ends with birds."
"Let me tell you a story
about hope: it always starts
and ends with birds."
June 11, 2022
3.5 stars. As is a common theme when I read poetry, I feel like I am not quite smart enough for much of these poems and cannot enjoy them as much as such...
February 24, 2023
"I fold and unfold my heart a hundred times each day so that it doesn't freeze."
June 6, 2023
There is a bird and a stone
in your body. Your job is not
to kill the bird with the stone.
(This was everything😍)
in your body. Your job is not
to kill the bird with the stone.
(This was everything😍)
June 10, 2023
“Let me tell you a story about hope: it always starts and ends with bandages.” 🖤
October 22, 2023
“Maybe we aren’t meant to remember anything here. Just meant to see. And to forget.”
February 21, 2024
it was okay??? the beginning had a few poems that i liked but after that eh…
many are esoteric too which i don’t like
many are esoteric too which i don’t like
Displaying 1 - 30 of 208 reviews