Obit by Victoria Chang (review)

Victoria Chang's Obit, her fifth poetry collection, examines possession and belonging with an inherent sense of public display. An obituary is, after all, an announcement, a public notice. Borrowing the shape of a newspaper obituary, these poems sustain a cast of objects at the moment they lose their human attachments.

So many of Chang's departed are listed without possession—"The Blue Dress," no longer the mother's dress, and "Hands," no longer anyone's. These poems linger as the speaker offers up her tangential attachment to what belonged to the departed. This accumulation of artifacts and memory becomes the body of the loved one, an artifact of grief in itself, "the way it dangles from everything/like earrings." The speaker states, "Grief is wearing a dead/person's dress forever," a phrase that rips at possession, that suggests that with losing the dress's attribution, its belonging, the speaker loses her own. If grief is a liminal space, Victoria Chang is its interior designer. She has built a space we can occupy with grief, a matrix, a containment effort, even for herself.

Victoria Chang dies the most in this collection. She dies four times. The first time, she warns the reader:

When her mother called about herfather's heart attack, she was livingan indented life a swallow that didn'tdip. This was not her first death. Allher deaths have creases except thisone.

Here the collection makes readers witnesses to the death of the self. Other poems announce deaths of "My Father's Frontal Lobe" and "My Mother," but the collection also considers that we are not ourselves forever. Chang has forewarned of the impossibility of completing life as one person. Consider, who are we without our mothers? Or as Chang puts it, "the future/closes its offices when a mother dies." But beyond the existential absurdity is another self the speaker anticipates losing, and Obit's formal tone, combined with the litany of deaths for the living and inanimate, builds into a cold humor that argues against empathy. After all, it is this collection's humor that demonstrates how strongly grief is a solitary task.

It's Chang's return to the writer's body that becomes elegiac. In an interview, Chang explains, "The old self dies all the time, and it's quite miraculous." Coming back is the human part, "I touched them, smelled/them, thought I heard a whimper." Grief becomes a kind of living, a consumption. "The way grief needs / oxygen," needs the living, needs the obituary. Chang shows grief as a burning action:

I always knew that griefwas something I could smell. ButI didn't know that it's not actually anoun but a verb. That it moves.

And she anticipates that, as with any consumption, there must be an end product. Amidst the obits, with their utilitarian tone, Chang directs readers past the collected objects "recently / featured in a museum," to the movement they cannot show. If we start in the museum, we end with a pyre. We find an action beyond the historical lexicon, a communion with the loved one whose work we share:

yelling at my father, she was right.When language leaves, all you haveleft is tone, all you have left are smokesignals. I didn't know she was usingher own body as wood.

Obit presents a personal grief. It is not ours. There is no empathetic knowing of what the smoke signals mean. Instead, grief is Chang's thorough craft that leads to wonder. Chang indexes grief, she dates the artifacts that point to the death we know has happened, but we cannot know the bounds of it. These poems unravel "unpeacefully," "unknowingly," "unwillingly," interring the objects tangential to lived experience, or perhaps, objects that are themselves experiences, the way "the paper swan represents an animal / swan," and the father's "brain is the water the/animal swan once swam in," which "holds / everything."