With My Back to the World - by Victoria Chang

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Poems of remarkable vividness and depth . . . engaging in a constant celebration of life in terms of its inexorable passing, a feast of grief in which 'death still catches me by surprise.' Victoria Chang's finely tuned ear for microtones among the lower emotional notes makes this book good company as the days darken."
--Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR (Best Book of the Year)

"The poems in With My Back to the World are challenging and deeply felt; they both honor the legacy and work of Martin and reestablish Chang as a poet of precision, intellect, and considerable emotional heft."
―Roxane Gay, Audacious Book Club pick

"I was mesmerized by this collection of 'grid' poems inspired by abstract artist Agnes Martin. Out of these small spaces comes a world of grief, questioning, language, and the possibility of happiness, demanding our attention in masterful, poignant ways."
--Madeleine Wurzburger, The Poetry Society (Books of the Year)

"Victoria Chang is a tremendous, gorgeous, wonderful poet. Her writing is amazing . . . She uses artist Agnes Martin to inspire her while she writes about grief, loss, but also some of the hopefulness of the human experience. You'll be underlining so much of this, along with quietly smiling at her wit."
--Isaac Fitzgerald on The Today Show (Poetry Month Pick)

"Victoria Chang is continually expanding the possibilities of poetic form . . . [With My Back to the World] is an atmospheric landscape where borders dissolve: between speaker and artwork . . . between painting and language . . . between making and being observed. Visual art and poetry are intricately connected, and Chang shows us the skein."
--Natasha Rao, The Rumpus

"Exploring art, grief, feminism, and aging, this collection is emotionally and intellectually incisive and will engage readers both familiar and unfamiliar with Martin's abstractions."
--New York Public Library (Our Favorite Poetry Books of 2024, So Far)

"Chang creates the conditions for deep connection between readers and her work, for a sense of accompaniment on a path of inquiry. Perhaps freedom here is the freedom to intersect, to shed our isolation. In depicting "not the sky, [but] the beauty of the sky," Chang reminds us of what we share and invites us into conversation."
--Emily Pérez, Harvard Review

"These poems do not seek to explain anything, rather they are like paintings themselves, to be perceived and experienced, ready to shed some transient moments of truth."
--Jennifer Wong, Asian Review of Books

"With My Back to the World, which connects intimately to its predecessors while being distinctly its own thing, adds another dimension to an extraordinary body of [Chang's] work."
--Paul Scott Stanfield, Hong Kong Review of Books

"The poems in Victoria Chang's With My Back to the World explore unwelcoming metaphysical depths, fearlessly probing the self, existence, life, death, and depression. Her lyrical strategy . . . allows her to create a new space, a place where depression and grief can be accepted rather than rejected or stigmatized . . . [With My Back to the World] proffers a valuable invitation to readers to look at realms of the self that they would prefer to ignore."
--Nicole Yurcaba, The Arts Fuse

"Chang thrives at embodying and vocalizing universal feelings of anxiety, joy, grief, fear, and wonder. Further, it's as if readers of her poetry are invited to visit a theater designed to accommodate a form or tradition with which she is obsessed . . . [With My Back to the World] is fully engaged with Agnes Martin's paintings, drawings, and writings . . . Chang expertly probes the limitations of art's ability to offer comfort or satisfaction."
--David Roderick, Poets & Writers

"With My Back to the World once more puts forward Chang's genius for deploying formal constraint in order to explore aspects of personal identity and emotion . . . Whether writing about her family or the work of Agnes Martin, Victoria Chang's poetry is always extending outward . . . Poem to poem, Martin is a presence and a reflection; through her presence, the speaker externalizes internal psychological and emotional states. What a gift to the reader, this invitation to press outwardly and inwardly at once as if both reaching and grasping simultaneously, as if holding hands."
--Kathryn Savage, World Literature Review

"Powerful poems that illuminate a mind pressing against its own grief, depression, and a repressive world. Adherence to constrictive form is a hallmark of Chang's work, and here, the poems evoke the unique abstract geometric structure of Martin's work."
--Heidi Seaborn, The Adroit Journal

"Victoria Chang is continually expanding the possibilities of poetic form . . .
[With My Back to the World] is an atmospheric landscape where borders dissolve . . . Visual art and poetry are intricately connected, and Chang shows us the skein."
--Natasha Rao, The Rumblr

"[The poems of With My Back to the World] are resounding interactions between poet and painter. Chang's distress not only permeates the scored rectangles of Agnes Martin's canvas, but bleeds along its edges to saturate every poem . . . A multi-layered, complicated canvas where grief drawn onto a preconceived happiness illuminates a marked, nuanced expression of both, giving way to a reanimated artistry."
--Kale Kim, International Examiner

"Victoria Chang's With My Back to the World is a stunning book that merges fiercely disciplined form with wild thought and mordant wit. Readers of Chang's work . . . will catch glimpses of her persistent themes held to a new light. Like shot silk, the translucent language of this densely interwoven text shimmers with new colors in the light of each rereading."
--Linda Mills Woolsey, Plume

"The magnetism of Chang's language will convince you of the power of her project . . . Again and again, there's the moment of recognition that readers come to poetry for: Here is a feeling you know well, but have never been able to witness outside of yourself. Isn't it liberating to put these words to it? Don't you feel less alone in your loneliness?"
--Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, BookPage (starred review)

"Intriguingly, throughout this exhilarating collection Chang's own illustrations parallel the energy her writing conveys . . . Chang's lines are immediate and affecting; much like Martin's radiant paintings, they exist to be seen and felt, read and absorbed."
--Raúl Niño, Booklist (starred review)

"Painterly, meditative . . . 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."
--Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"Victoria Chang's lucid and playful poetry surprised and moved me with its friendly abundance of Koanlike lines--stimulating yet calming news from the dreamy outskirts of human consciousness."
--Tao Lin, author of Leave Society

"In Agnes Martin's grid paintings, each pale rectangle can feel like an hour, a day, or a year. The effect of all these small variations seen at once approximates the overwhelming fact of other lives. With My Back to the World gives Victoria Chang that same kind of quiet, intimate, constrained but infinite room to work in. This book is the record of an artful, attentive mind, full of startling insights ("My solitude is like the grass. I become so aware of its presence that it too begins to feel like an audience"), a testament to care, integrity, and persistence."
--Elisa Gabbert, author of Normal Distance

About the Author

Victoria Chang's forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World, will be published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her latest book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), her prior book of poems, was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Must-Read Book, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also longlisted for a National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Literature Award. She is the Bourne Chair of Poetry at Georgia Tech and the Director of Poetry@Tech.