Victoria Chang's previous collection felt a bit more compelling than this one, i just connected with it more. still, there were segments and poems that worked well

In “With My Back to the World: Poems” (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2024), Victoria Chang communes with abstract artist Agnes Martin’s (1912-2004) paintings and writing. The title for the poetry collection and each individual poem derive from Martin’s artwork, which includes pieces on view at the Modern Museum of Art (MoMA) in New York City.

Chang explores her depression—its tones, divides, and endless numbered gray elements—through her interactions with Martin's art. In “White Stone, 1965,” she juxtaposes her own overwhelming grief and lament with Martin’s pat and prescribed “make happiness your goal.” The artistic elements and (re)constructed conversations offer curious and creative interplay.

“On a Clear Day, 1973,” Chang contemplates the grids in Martin’s artwork, including boxes, thoughts, and openings that are both theoretical and illusionary. Her poem is also presented in a grid-like construct (4 across, 7 down on my e-reader). A marvel of poetry, brevity, and design, it mirrors the seriality of Martin’s initial piece (10 across, 3 down on a gallery wall) from 1973.

Another stunning compilation from Victoria Chang!

Thank you to Victoria Chang, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, and NetGalley for my eARC.

"To think, everyone will write one final word."

I believe my review will be a bit of an outlier, but here goes. I absolutely loved, was entranced by, and (ugly) cried to Victoria Chang's Obit - and I was expecting to have a similar experience to With My Back to the World, and while this was an objectively great collection, I did not feel the same pull I'm used to feeling when reading a Victoria Chang book. I enjoyed the first half of the book, but it personally felt like it dragged on towards the end.

Thank you NetGalley & Farrar, Straus and Giroux for allowing me to read With My Back to the World in exchange for an honest review!

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC!

I'm a huge fan of Victoria Chang's poetry and each collection she writes is something to savor. Each continue to linger in my mind. I was so happy when I was approved for this eARC. Victoria Chang deftly writes about depression, life, relationships, and grief with such care and precision in this latest ekphrastic poetry collection, which is inspired by and in conversation with the abstract minimalist art of Agnes Martin. I was amazed, once again, with how this collection was written and put together. I can't wait for the next book by Chang!

Thank you to FSG & NetGalley for the copy! Victoria Chang never fails to stun me into disbelief. I remember years ago reading her 2020 collection, Obit, a sorrowful ode to her woes in the wake of her mother's passing. While With My Back to the World is comparably melancholic, its lamenting feels far more languid and almost unrelenting. There are still those tinges of grief that fray at the edges of her poetry, but depression this time around is more apparent, made sour by its unyielding pace, its unending drawl.

There's a need for realization in the world, for Chang to feel existent and understood by others outside of her own perceptions. In "Untitled #5, 1998", she writes:

"What if I've spent my whole life wanting to be seen? In that way, I've wanted to be the painting, not the painter. / But I am the painter. Even now, I walk outside at night just so the sky can see me one more time."

But there also seems to be this sense of inevitability in her poems, a teetering between surrendering to it or watching it play out from the sidelines. Like in "Play, 1996", she asks:

"Is it possible to write down how we feel without betraying our feelings? Once I write the word depression, it is no longer my feeling. It is now on view for others to walk toward, lean in, and peer at."

Constantly, I feel this slight of resignation in Chang's recent work. Her words have never felt gentle to begin with, but this time around, there's less of a fervor in her agony, and more of a submission to it that feels devotional. Something that Chang has always left me with is this sense that grief is so unselfish but also the most self-indulgent feeling we can have.

5/5 - every year with something new from Chang is a wonderful year

5/5 ⭐️

A beautiful collection of poems that deal with topics such as depression, grief, death, and limits of language. I enjoyed the writing style of these poems, ekphrastic, as that is not something I have seen in the poetry collections I have read recently. I will be purchasing a physical copy of this collection because I wanted to highlight so many quotes and themes dealing with depression. The poetry titles are based on the painting titles by Agnes Martin and some contain graphics from said poems which I loved as it gave a hint as to what she wanted you to feel.

“Maybe they are one long string, made into small even humps. If I pull one end, my depression will flatten, but my words will also disappear.”

“I used to think depression was all around me, that I was within it. Now I see that it is always ahead of me. That it is in pieces, but it moves in a swarm.”

Release day April 2nd!

Thank you NetGalley for a complementary copy of this book from the publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in exchange for an honest review.

I real enjoyed and flew through the first half of this collection, but the last 50% felt very repetitive and dense. There were a few poems and lines that I really enjoyed, but for a lot of this one, I didn’t understand what the poems were saying (which doesn’t mean it’s not good poetry, just that that’s why it’s not a perfect collection for me personally). I did really appreciate the themes in this one and I enjoyed how this collection was based off of different artwork and how each piece of art was described.

This is a fantastic collection of poetry that is mainly framed as response pieces to Agnes Martin's artwork, and also does some bonus experimentation with redaction as a poetry form. Definitely worth a read!

Fascinating epistolary collection. Form and content was very inspiring. Highly recommend this collection to other poets.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC.

After looking up Agnes Martin's art work, this work of poetry by Victoria Chang comes together and is quite moving. Each poem is shares a title with a piece of artowk by Martin, thus what emotions are invoked from the piece have influences on the poem. I'm excited to see this book in print as Chang is very talented in uniquely organizing her words as well as to see the accompanying images.

Chang uses Martin's art work as a way to work through her depression after her father passes away, and there is great emotion spilling from each word. This is my first time reading Victoria Chang but it won't be my last!

Wide-ranging and unified. In conversation with Agnes Martin’s abstract art, Chang’s poems explore grief, loss, death, depression, solitude, nature, and the act of creating poetry itself. Her long-form poem “Today” has been in and on my mind since I read it. The clear structure and narrative arc elevates the collection from good to great.

Victoria Chang is an inventive poet and I read everything she writes. This book is full of grief and I could only read a few pages at a poem. Then I needed to go outside and breathe before continuing. The backbone of the book is based on the artwork of Agnes Martin. Chang dialogues with her dead father, her children, and Martin's work throughout the book. A particularly unusual memoir about grieving your parents, and wondering how to continue into the future.

A friend of mine introduced me to Victoria Chang's poetry a few years ago, and I've been captivated by her work ever since. Her latest collection, "With My Back To The World," is inspired by Agnes Martin's painting, showcasing the artists' shared exploration of emotions. Chang's poems beautifully express her grief and depression following her father's loss, intertwined with the profound artistic insights of Martin. The use of color in both their work adds depth and elegance to this remarkable literary piece. I eagerly anticipate the release of the complete book.

A fellow bookseller handed me a collection of Victoria Chang’s poetry a few years back and I’ve been smitten ever since. Her latest, ‘With My Back To The World’, is named after a painting done by artist Agnes Martin.
Chang often writes about sadness and grief, and some of Martin’s later works are named after emotional states as well. The way that Chang has paired her own grief and subsequent depression over the loss of her father, with thoughts and descriptions of Agnes Martin’s work as an artist is brilliant!
Their use of color, both literal and to describe emotions, just add beauty to this amazing work.
I can’t wait to see the finished copy when this book comes out!

“With my back to the world” is a stark telling of depression and life in poetry. Its use of art as a motif, lines and shapes and angles telling stories is beautiful and expertly manifests a visual world for the reader. The long form poem central to this book is masterful in its day to day depiction of mourning, it has stuck with me as if it’s my journey too.

A thought-provoking and stunning collection of ekphrastic poetry that seamlessly blends the worlds of art and language. Chang takes inspiration from artists Agnes Martin and On Kawara and the poems take their titles from their paintings which ensured that I felt like I was walking through multiple art museums carrying Chang's words with me. The poems were incisive and I loved how their construction on the page spoke to the art's structure. I have so many new favorite poems and a whole new collection of quotes!

Some quotes that moved me:
“Every poem is trying to be the last free words on earth.” - Homage to Life, 2003

“The best thing about emptiness is if you close your eyes in a field, you’ll open your eyes in a field.” - With My Back to the World, 1997

“Agnes said that solitude and freedom are the same. My solitude is like the grass. I become so aware of its presence that it too begins to feel like an audience.” - Grass, 1967

“What is art but trying to make something resemble what it was before it was made, when it was still unknown and free?” - Fiesta, 1985

“What is dying but a/form of hunger, visible to God.” - Jan, 9, 2022 (Today Poem)

Poems that I will be revisiting again:
With My Back to the World, 1997
Little Sister
Buds, 1959
Aspiration, 1960
Grass, 1967
Fiesta, 1985
Today (long poem but specifically Jan 9, Jan 18, Jan 26, Jan 28, Jan 30, Feb 2, Feb 14 entries)
Red Bird, 1964
The Beach, 1964
Night Sea, 1963

Victoria Chang's new poetry book is exciting to read. It's like entering an art gallery, where you not only take in the art but also marvel at the organization of what's on display. She includes many different kinds of forms here: erasure, prose poetry, rhymed couplets, and diary-type entries. Most of the poems are about loss, depression, and the process of art-making. Most of the time I was deeply moved by the poems, and others I felt lost and bewildered (but maybe that's the point). I always enjoy her poems whenever I read them, and will continue to seek out her work. I wouldn't be surprised to see this collection get many awards this year.

With My Back to the World, Victoria Chang
In her latest poetry book, With My Back to the World, Victoria Chang traces her reaction to abstract paintings, where she finds a communion in their recognition of the gaps between feeling and artistic expression, between emotion and language. This is not new territory for Chang – most of her poetry collections explore the adequacy or inadequacy of forms of any kind to express emotion fully and honestly. In OBIT, she used the physical columnar form of newspaper obituaries to contain, and to explode beyond, the emotions of grief and the experience of loss.

Here, she takes on a harder challenge, and is wildly inventive and exciting in her approach. Following Agnes Martin’s abstract art, she traces her own experience as a woman and an artist, and her experience of her father’s illness and death. The challenge is made harder because Agnes Martin’s artwork is unknown to most people who do not follow art closely and do not have access to galleries and museums. Martin’s work is abstract, based on repetition of lines or grids or dots, and the real impact of her art occurs when it is witnessed in person – the subtle brush work, the softly blurred lines in an apparently regular shape. The artwork’s subtleties, and scale, do not carry over well to printed reproductions. Unless you have seen Martin’s work in person at a gallery or museum, you really won’t “get” it. Chang’s attempt to give the reader some sense of the art, as she reacts with it or to it, includes naming poems with the title and year of a Martin piece, and having an imaginary dialogue with Martin as they look at the artwork together. That’s inventive, and pulls the reader in, but it also leaves the art and its impact, and the personality of Martin herself, unknown by the person reading the poetry. Chang complicates this even further by never telling the reader who the artist is – she mentions “Agnes” but there is nothing in the titles or intro to inform you the artist is Agnes Martin; you’ll need to deduce that from reviews and blurbs, and wonder how anyone figured it out. This adds a lot of work for the reader, and increases the ante for the poetry – will it be worth it?

I saw the blurbs and reviews mentioning Agnes Martin, and found an online documentary about her life and work. That added a good layer of depth to how I read Chang’s poems. Without that, I would not have sustained an interest in the poetry itself. Don’t get me wrong – it’s very good poetry, and there are images and lines that sparkle with insight and ask big questions. But tethering the whole thing to and being in dialogue with art and an artist that I can’t figure out is a really big ask of the reader, and would have left me exhausted and confused.

The poems themselves, per usual with Victoria Chang, are startling and insightful, veering rapidly from a huge personal grief into an observation about art in general, or Agnes Martin’s work in particular, and back again. That technique threads a needle, ever so skillfully, between deeply internal and hidden feelings and the artist’s need to express them, and really does stitch art and life together in a wonderful way. All the while, Chang sees how inadequate any art or language can be, and how an artist (and a woman) is always on the knife edge of wanting to be seen but not watched, not misunderstood. In The Islands, 1961, she asks: “Agnes left some lines uncovered on the borders, showing us how happiness is made. How even happiness is made by writing something down, then leaving it exposed for all to see. Is it possible to be seen, but not looked at?”

These philosophical battles about art, language, what is true or what is observed, what is exposed or not, the extra edge of being a woman, being a daughter – all make the poetry challenging, worthwhile, very intelligent, wonderfully creative, always fluid. This is a worthwhile poetry book—difficult, but definitely worthwhile.
Martin’s art is decidedly non-representational. She meant it to be experienced, responded to. She carefully avoided any representation, and went so far as to refuse to have titles of the artwork printed in a gallery catalogue – experience it, don’t read it, don’t try to figure out what it is, she might have said. If you haven’t seen Martin’s art but perhaps have seen a piece of Mark Rothko’s art, you’ll get it. I admire the courage and inventiveness of Victoria Chang in writing poetry – language! representation! nouns and verbs! – that uses such art as a launching pad. And in using the poetry and the art to navigate grief, feelings of inadequacy (what daughter doesn’t feel that?), sadness about her father’s death. The personal ache of the father’s death provides many of the moments the poetry reaches out to the reader.

The poetry collection plays with the ideas of art abstraction, showing the text of a poem overlaid with squiggles and made into an unreadable work of abstraction, and then providing the text of the poem. This constant back and forth keeps the reader immersed in the idea of abstract art, and the need to simply look at something and experience it before it can be read and understood. A few of the attempts to mirror a piece of art do not work so well – an example is Little Sister, where the art work is constructed of rows of dots formed by nails, and the poem reflecting that artwork is words broken up by regular dots, sort of like faux line-breaks. Lacking the texture, the physicalness, the starting contrast between material and title that the artwork holds, a poem broken up by dots just doesn’t bring the same effect. Other poems where, for example, Martin’s gridwork paintings are transformed into a poem with grids of phrases work much better (With My Back to the World, 1997).

The poems are at their best when Chang is simply doing what she does best – questioning, shaking grief loose by making it tangible in unexpected ways. In Untitled #10, 2002, she asks, “What happens if these aren’t pastoral or war poems? When I can feel the light I carry on my back but can’t see it or use it? // When sadness and language cast the same shadow. These six strips are the shadows of our blood, proving that every woman’s life can // be broken into and displayed.” She finishes that poem softly referring to both her parents’ deaths, then going back to the question of art: “Maybe our bodies never had a vanishing point, // so there will always be hunger. Even a woman’s life is trying to become more than the woman it represents.” Boom.

Thanks to #netgalley, and #fsg (#Farrar, Straus and Giroux) for the ARC.

A delicate and lovingly written collection of ekphrastic poetry. Chang writes poems inspired by the works of artist Agnes Martin while weaving in themes of grief, womanhood, and human connection. The collection boasts interesting form and erasure/blackout poems, along with rich metaphorical prose. A really lovely read.

My favorite poems are: "Summer, 1964", "Buds, 1959", "Untitled IX, 1982", and "Untitled, 2004."

A stunningly beautiful collection of ekphrastic poetry that tackles themes around grief, loss, depression, family, and the limits of language.

This latest collection by Victoria Chang is inspired by, and in conversation with, the abstract minimalist art of Agnes Martin. Each poem takes its title from one of her paintings, and I found myself eagerly flipping between Google and each poem to explore the painting, then think about the connection between Martin's and Chang's pieces. Chang also prefaces some of the text poems with more avant-garde artistic treatments of her poem that you read on the following page, from blocking it into grids (like Agnes Martin), to drawing curlicue squiggles across the lines, to completely blacking it out. This added another dimension of appreciation for me.

Like so many good poems, these invite you to read and savor them one at a time, rather than quickly moving to the next. I found myself highlighting and annotating many lines to remember later. A few standout poems that I will return to again and again:

Buds, 1959
Grass, 1967
Falling Blue, 1963
The Tree, 1964
Fiesta, 1985
Today (a masterpiece of a long poem)
Untitled #5, 1998


Definitely check out this collection; it's short but packs a punch. Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.