However, the poet's father - a former project engineer at Ford Motor Company - had refused to speak about his past, deeming such dialogue 'useless' shortly before suffering a debilitating stroke that damaged his frontal lobe. In this instance, Chang was able to interview her mother Jeng Jin and learn facts about her life in Taiwan and subsequent immigration to the U.S before the latter's death from pulmonary fibrosis. While structurally complex, Dear Memory articulates grief's basic anxieties, 'The things that didn't matter at the time are often the most urgent questions after someone has died.' A person's mental decline or death can exacerbate the preexisting norms of silence within his or her family - silence caused by shame, trauma, ignorance, language, and cultural attitudes. Resuming the expressively compressed approach of her 2020 Obit, the poet's latest work represents a dual articulation of remembrance and creation, as if 'ach word, a clavicle, a femur, each sentence, an organ.' In defining language as the nucleus for experience, Chang's innovative montage brings to mind Jorge Luis Borges' The Aleph - a haunting story that reconciles mortality with the creative imagination via a point in space - where time and memory are converged as omniscient reality. Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, by Victoria ChangĪ groundbreaking collage of epistles, mementos, poetry, and literary criticism, Victoria Chang's Dear Memory asks a profound question: 'Can memory be / unhoused, or is it / the form in which / everything is held?'

Obit by Victoria Chang