Victoria Chang

Obit is a book of obituaries for things that are not people. Victoria Chang wrote it after her mother died in 2015 and her father lost his speech to a stroke, and she set the poems in the narrow column of a newspaper death notice, one for her mother's blue dress, one for her father's frontal lobe, one for language itself. Copper Canyon issued it in 2020. It took the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry and reached a readership poetry collections rarely do. Chang was born in Detroit in 1970 to Taiwanese parents, holds degrees from Michigan, Harvard and Stanford, and directs the poetry programme at Georgia Tech. Her other books include Barbie Chang, The Trees Witness Everything and the prose work Dear Memory.