Obit By Victoria Chang (Grades 10+)

Victoria Chang was born in Detroit, Michigan. Her publications include books include The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon, 2022); OBIT (Copper Canyon, 2020); Circle (2005), and Barbie Chang (2017). In 2015, she loses her mother to pulmonary fibrosis, a loss that took away her language and forever altered her syntactical organization. Published in 2020, Obit explores, in the format of newspaper obituaries, what she lost, beyond the obvious, beyond the material. It depicts the boundaries between what is public and private, and makes visible the path of grief as it struggles to personify itself in language. It makes clear that grammatical constraint itself was an invention, and how to deny that is to deny that we made it up as we went.