Description

After her mother’s death, Victoria Chang refuses the familiar comfort of elegy and instead turns to a startlingly intimate form: the poetic obituary. Written in the feverish aftermath of loss, these poems reimagine the newspaper obituary as a way to name what has died—civility, language, the future, even a mother’s blue dress—while tracing how grief keeps moving through daily life. Rather than trying to preserve the dead, Chang captures the living work of remembering, showing how love becomes a conduit for self-expression and how absence reshapes identity, family, and culture. With Chang’s sharp, lyrical intelligence and unflinching emotional clarity, *Obit* offers a powerful testament to mourning’s ongoing presence and the ways we learn to live with what’s gone.

Available Editions

paperback edition cover

paperback

Copper Canyon Press

Published Apr 7, 2020

118 pages

ISBN: 9781619322189

available

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Community Reviews(1)

@gxuosiJul 3, 2026

really unique format of obituaries as poems, but ultimately this was just fine. i struggled to connect with the stunted sentences, repetitions, and really unexpected symbolism used. the format was the best part.

Details

First Published

2020

Language

eng

Content Warnings

Content and trigger warnings for Obit by Victoria Chang.

Death/Grief