“Obit,” by Victoria Chang, appears in the July/Aug 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.
These six meticulously crafted prose poems are exemplars of the possibilities and promises of refraction. Each titled Obit, the poems purport to eulogize not a loved one, but concepts and objects: Friendships, Optimism, The Clock, Affection, and Clothes, and The Ocean. Yet, through this constellation of unlikely remembrances, the poems come together to memorialize, celebrate, and mourn a mother and ruminate on intimate loss.
One notable and admirable aspect of these poems is how they exist as self-contained universes but also, when read together, offer new and additional resonances and connections. This makes the set of six an ideal grouping for a literary magazine. Poems published like this, in a single issue of a journal, might be read in sequence by a reader sitting down with the print object, but they might also be read individually or in partial groupings as they make their way online. Or they might be read in conversation with other poems from Chang’s Obit project, which can be found in Poetry, AGNI, and elsewhere, and are instantly recognizable as component parts of this same project. In the first of the six Obit poems in KR, Chang writes, “All my selves spread out like a deck of cards,” and we hear the speaker describing not only the sense of dissociation that inheres in grief but also the poetic impulse at hand. These individual poems come together, separate, shuffle associations among themselves, and, finally, recombine.
For example, in the Obit for Optimism, Chang describes a scene in which the speaker, surrounded by family at a holiday meal, eats a fish ball and then acknowledges how the fish has been “gutted and rolled into a humiliating shape.” The subsequent concluding line—“To acknowledge death is to acknowledge that we must take another shape—is then echoed in the poem that comes after, which describes a father’s cognitive state. “If you unfold an origami swan, and flatten the paper, is the paper sad because it has seen the shape of the swan or does it aspire toward flatness, a life without creases? My father is the paper.” Individually, these poems offer their own cerebral, aching meditations on form and formlessness, speaking within and across themselves to create discrete moments of epiphany that give way to larger searchings.