Dear Memory - by Victoria Chang

Book Synopsis

"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

Now in paperback, from the poet who "resurrects mediums" (The Millions), 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 in the silences of her father. 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 questions that can no longer be answered.

Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In letters to family, past teachers, fellow poets, and to the imagination itself, Victoria Chang offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.

Review Quotes

Praise for Dear Memory

"[Dear Memory] is an open-ended inquiry not of a bounded life but of an ongoing present, full of longing and imperfection . . . Chang has followed language to the edge of what she knows; the question her book asks is whether language can go further still . . . Her own project is not to erase those incisions--or even, as a child might hope, to heal them--but to retrace and redescribe them. If there are wounds in the past, she seeks to live with them as scars." --New Yorker

"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." --Thúy Dinh, NPR

"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

"Both a chronicling of [Chang's] family's history and a powerful, stirring rumination on ancestry, inherited trauma and home." --TIME Magazine, "Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2021"

"[Dear Memory is] a collage of fragments constituting a moving portrait of the poet herself." --Los Angeles Times, "Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2021"

"Dear Memory is the work of a gifted poet, a wordsmith who is conscious that absent a chance to be an eyewitness to the past, we are left to spin our own webs of emotional significance and nostalgia." --Lorraine Berry, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"After the impressive formal innovations of her 2020 book, OBIT, which won multiple national awards, Chang continues to find new ways to plumb her experiences on the page . . . Depending on what one brings to this book, each reader may find their own moment of goosebumps or tears . . . This book is moving in a way that transcends story and message; it captures a pure sense of another person's heart." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"Chang has assembled a collection of letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as well as family memorabilia, creating not just a moving family history but a rumination on the creative and self-shaping act of remembering." --Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"

"A moving consideration of ancestry and loss . . . [Chang's] 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." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Ever inventive, ever searching, Chang bends genres to approach an unmanageable emotion." --Observer

"These letters to the past that are paving stones to the future is the verdant ground that Victoria Chang explores in these, dare I say, memorable essays." --Colorado Review

"Victoria Chang's Dear Memory is a tender exploration of grief, an excavation into stories untold, memories unshared, the treasures that await our discoveries if we trace through the lives that held ours. It is a vulnerable and evocative experience of what it means to miss, to yearn, to return to the pieces of our most beloved." --Kao Kalia Yang

About the Author

Victoria Chang's most recent book of poems, With My Back to the World, received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection and was named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Obit received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN/Voelcker Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Other recent books include The Trees Witness Everything and several children's books. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the Director of Poetry@Tech.