Obit

Starred review from January 20, 2020
The exceptional fifth book from Chang (Barbie Chang) does not open with death, at least not in the way its title might suggest. It opens instead with a father’s stroke and the assertion that grief “is really about future absence.” The collection explores the newspaper obituary through prose blocks whose language moves between shuddering realism and more lyrical elaborations. One poem recalls: “After my father’s stroke, my mother no longer spoke in full sentences... Maybe this is what happens when language fails, a last breath inward but no breath outward. A state of holding one’s breath forever but not dying.” The sparser tankas about children and the future offer some of the book’s most exquisite and painful moments: “My children, children,/ today my hands are dreaming/ as they touch your hair./ Your hair turns into winter./ When I die, your hair will snow.” Chang’s poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore.

March 1, 2020
In Chang's fifth collection, she ardently searches for balance after the death of her mother. Early on, she writes To acknowledge death is / to acknowledge that we must take / another shape. Intrigued by the look and sound of the word obit, Chang has created a unique poetic construct. Made up of four parts, its 95 stanza-like sections resemble clippings from a newspaper's obituary section. Most have no titles, while I Am a Miner. The Light Turns Blue is a masterfully paced 12-page poem packed with lines that will persist in the mind such as, disregard the billions of bodies rushing out like smoked bees, or the rain does not have a mouth it is more slap than tongue . The feeling of hope is a theme throughout this solid collection, in variations Chang evokes with grace, Hope / is the wildest bird, the one that flies / so fast it will either disappear or burst / into flames. Chang's poetry fine tunes that conflagration with acuity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

May 1, 2020

In her fifth collection, Guggenheim Fellowship winner Chang (The Boss) uses an unusual subject--obituaries--to shed light on what qualities make for a good life as well as a passable death. In predominantly page-length prose poems, her obits address the speaker's parents but also cover privacy, language, and the future as well as memory, hope, and even obsession: "Sadness--dies while the man across the street trims the hedges and I can see my children doing cartwheels." The poems are infused with both grief and the need to accept it while responding to the demands of a career and raising a family. Using a first line from Sylvia Plath as its title, "I am a Miner. The Light Turns Blue," the free-verse poem comprising the book's second section, reinforces themes of death and grief while also considering ambition, happiness, and rain. At times, it becomes a hodgepodge but is also rich with beautiful lines that connect readers to emotion. A series of tanka about parenting become side notes to the narrative flow and are, on the whole, less effective. VERDICT Often incorporating short declarative sentences, Chang's poems can veer toward being list-like but move forward quickly to endings that surprise and even amaze as they burrow deep into those grieving places all of us have experienced. Recommended for most collections.--Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

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