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.

This collection masterfully marries the feelings of despair and depression with the beauty of art and life. Somehow, Chang is able to carefully create entire lifetimes in each small poem while also telling the story of the painting the poem is named after. They also carefully walk through the binary if feeling and remembering and how those things differ but live in the same spaces. This collection also deals with mortality and the space of after. In a way, I think Chang wants us to leave each painting and poem knowing how empty and exhilarating life is after walking away from something—whether that something is a spider web, a life, or wheat fields. Masterfully done. I’ll be thinking about these poems for a very long time.

** A copy of With My Back to the World was provided by the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review **

I think it's safe to say Victoria Chang is one of my favourite writers. I've read four books/collections by her and rated all of them five stars each! No one writes about/with/beside grief, love and depression as well as Victoria does! With My Back to the World is a collection of poems I took my time with but devoured at the same time. So many of the pieces resonated with me deeply and I've definitely found some new favourite lines and poems. Thought-provoking, moving, melancholic, and poignant, this collection is a beautiful triumph!

❝What happened when you're not supposed to be depressed? When depression becomes a form of your happiness?❞

Thought provoking poetry weaving together feminism and silent thoughts of the world in a melancholic perspective, Chang captures the small appreciation for determined to meddling thoughts of women. Good consistent prose and voice however nothing that particularly stood out to me. I found the painting Agnes hard to highlight without consistent context and build up. It was definitely a miss and an opportunity to include a factual premise/foreword or an anecdote to a powerful allegory. Perhaps having references in the beginning or occasional footnote would make this much more engaging and interesting to revisit. Thus, this personally this wasn’t for me but still holding worthy of a read for anyone interested in themes of grief, depression, and feminism. (2.5 stars)

Thank you to Net Galley and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I will preface this by noting that I have enjoyed everything I've read by this author. I always find something interesting, different, profound and thought-provoking. To date, this one is the most abstract and I'm sure there were ideas or passages I didn't completely understand; just as with Agnes Martin's art. After reading, I did look at a lot of Martin's art to understand the connection between the poems. Abstract art has always been difficult for me. Yet, these poems opened me to a new expression and a different way to understand the author's feelings of depression, loss, grief, self and existence. There is a beauty and emotion in everything she writes.

Was not quite what I was expecting, but was still beautiful. These were poems dealing with depression, grief, and art. Some of it went a bit over my head and were hard to understand, but overall the feel of the poetry was deep and moving.

Thanks to NetGalley and FSG for the ARC!

"Obit" is my favorite collection of poetry, so I was beyond excited to get a chance to read Victoria Chang’s "With My Back to the World," a project in conversation with the artwork of Agnes Martin. Like her past several collections, this is a book birthed by self-imposed constraints, but like its predecessors, knowledge of those parameters isn’t necessary for enjoyment.

Over her past several collections, Victoria Chang has become increasingly concerned with the intersection of visual art and poetry, with "Dear Memory" signaling a turning point in the poet’s apparent desire for language to be material, tangible enough to withstand the physical realities of life. In "With My Back to the World," that idea reaches its full fruition.

Chang’s prior work has long been thematically concerned with the inadequacy of language, and that continues here through her engagement with Martin’s art. The artist's paintings generally favor symmetry, and these predictable patterns act as the perfect vessel for the book’s subject matter. The avoidance of novelty in favor of iteration mirrors the way people seek language to explain pain. Sometimes repetition is all we have. Furthermore, the artist’s minimalism offers a kind of kinship for Chang’s austere specificity. The poet has such a delicate touch here that it feels intuitive to watch her attempt to gridlock depression. For those who share her struggle, they know that the pain is often in its amorphous inexplicability.

If it had a shape, it could be held.

This is where the poems in this collection live—the space between experience and its cause, a desire to understand feelings more than their origin. As Chang writes in “Aspiration, 1960,”

"I am trying to draw a woman’s heartbeat, not the heart. The sensation of being strangled, not the hands around my neck."

As these poems accumulate, their disinterest in causality begins to form another question through punctured aphorisms and collocations—what is the role of art in light of its insufficiency? Why do we persist when it cannot solve anything? It’s a question with personal stakes in this book. I remember a professor criticizing me for referring to a poet by name rather than saying “the speaker” because we shouldn’t assume that the voice is one in the same, but here, Chang repeatedly acknowledges that she will be recognized in her work, even when she would like to be invisible. She poses the question most transparently in “The Islands, 1961”:

"Is it possible to be seen, but not looked at?"

It’s never answered directly, but I think readers will leave the book with their own ideas.

Like she did in "The Trees Witness Everything" and "Obit," Chang breaks from her book’s form only once and very intentionally. In part two of the three-part structure, she writes a heartbreaking day-by-day account of the days surrounding her father’s death. There are references to other poems in the collection here, so it still feels like it’s in conversation with the rest of the book, but I was more struck by how each of Victoria Chang’s projects are gradually coming more directly into dialogue with each other. This feels like an extension of Obit, not as redundancy but as its cathartic completion.

The same could be said for "With My Back to the World" as a whole. Victoria Chang is an artist who constantly reinvents herself to better articulate the impossibility of reinvention, and I feel so privileged to be able to read her work

Collection of poems you won't want to miss!

Loved the format, and visuals. It really brought the poems together from abstract to real.

Many topics are covered, but handled gently and explore self, how you view and how others view you, feminism, life - death and everything in between, how to handle grief & depression.

I really enjoyed this collection. These poems are in constant conversation with Agnes Martin's paintings and it's cool how Victoria uses those paintings as a springboard to launch her own ideas. I've never seen poetry do that before.

Each poem is named after an Agnes painting and it was fun to google the paintings while reading. Some poems are formatted in grids like the paintings which is cool. There are few line breaks in the poetry, most are blocks of text that look like prose. This isn't a bad thing, and I didn't mind it.

I love Victoria Chang’s poetry! She has such a striking ability to write poems about grief that instantly make me cry. This collection is largely about grief and love and having recently lost someone I felt overwhelmed by my ability to connect to Chang’s poems. The poems in the first and third section are about the work of Agnes Martin and the middle section is about the death of her father. I found all of these sections impactful but was blown away by the poetry in section one. What an astounding poetry collection.