With My Back to the World
Poems
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR
Named One of the Best Poetry Collections of the Year by The Guardian, Literary Hub, and Electric Literature
A new collection of poetry inspired by the work of Agnes Martin, exploring topics of feminism, art, depression, and grief, by the author of the prizewinning collection Obit.
Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square.
With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang’s new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The painterly, meditative latest from Chang (after Circle) enters in a dialogue with the visual artists Agnes Martin and On Kawara. Martin's grids and proclivity for numbers, divisions, and order encourage Chang toward quiet reflection, providing a container for sorrow: "all my/ thinking fits into/ boxes that can't/ be opened"; "I stood behind the rope and felt the/ melancholy of the room come out to greet my melancholy." Chang faces down solitude and the desire to be loved by complicating, and at times defying, those feelings: "we grow up thinking the future/ is possible, but soon realize we are estranged from it." Discussions of art invite questions about being observed: "Is it possible/ to be seen, but not looked/ at?" Chang asks, intriguingly admitting, "I've wanted to be the painting, not the painter." This collection is full of memorable insights as Chang experiments with erased and occluded work, all the while operating in the realm of feeling, where "desire is the only thing/ with nerve endings." These elegiac poems thoughtfully balance the head and the heart.
