Dear Memory
Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief
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4.0 • 1개의 평가
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- US$9.99
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- US$9.99
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Award-winning poet Victoria Chang's Dear Memory is a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.
For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.
Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.
In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.
"Chang's work is excavation, a digging through the muck of society for an existential clarity, a cultural clarity and a general clarity of self." —New York Times Book Review
"Groundbreaking . . . Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." —NPR
"Both a chronicling of [Chang's] family's history and a powerful, stirring rumination on ancestry, inherited trauma and home." —TIME
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Chang (Obit) brings a poet's lyricism to considering grief and memory in this powerful collection of letters. Mixing official documents, handwritten notes, photographs, and correspondence, she creates a moving consideration of ancestry and loss. There are letters to family members—one, titled "Dear Mother," is filled with Chang's speculations about her mother's move from China to Taiwan: "I would like to know if you took a train. If you walked. If you had pockets in your dress." Letters are also written to nonfamilial characters in Chang's life, among them "Dear Teacher," to a high school English teacher who "loved to read," and others to a slew of various acquaintances. Several pieces aren't addressed to people at all: there's "Dear Silence," which discusses language and shame; "Dear Body," which asks, "Have you ever wondered when I would let you go?"; and "Dear Ford Motor Company," which features a perfect-attendance letter sent from the company to the author's father. As Chang recounts the death of her mother and what it means to remember, her prose is sharp and strong—memory is "the exit wound of joy," she writes—and her creativity shines in her incorporation of the collage-like visual elements, which add depth. Fans of Chang's poetry will be delighted.
