With My Back to the World

Starred review from December 18, 2023
The painterly, meditative latest from Chang (after Circle) enters in a dialogue with the visual artists Agnes Martin and On Kawara. Martin’s grids and proclivity for numbers, divisions, and order encourage Chang toward quiet reflection, providing a container for sorrow: “all my/ thinking fits into/ boxes that can’t/ be opened”; “I stood behind the rope and felt the/ melancholy of the room come out to greet my melancholy.” Chang faces down solitude and the desire to be loved by complicating, and at times defying, those feelings: “we grow up thinking the future/ is possible, but soon realize we are estranged from it.” Discussions of art invite questions about being observed: “Is it possible/ to be seen, but not looked/ at?” Chang asks, intriguingly admitting, “I’ve wanted to be the painting, not the painter.” This collection is 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.

March 1, 2024
A minimalist mode grids Chang's seventh collection as her animated dialogues with artist Agnes Martin's work at times mirror the linear abstractions the painter is revered for. Having explored grief in her award-winning Obit (2020) and taken graceful inspiration from W. S. Merwin in The Trees Witness Everything (2022), Chang continues her discourse with makers. Here, in three parts, an echoing of time past and present is balanced with mortality. The middle section, ""Today,"" charts the opening two months in 2022 when her father was dying. Before and after that sequence are ruminations between Martin and Chang, the dead and the living. Art survives its maker, and writing endures beyond the writer. In ""Leaves, 1966,"" "we are tenants of language." In ""Untitled #5, 1977,"" "I forgive Agnes for giving us everything and nothing." Intriguingly, throughout this exhilarating collection Chang's own illustrations parallel the energy her writing conveys. Braving bouts of depression, she reasons with it in ""Summer, 1964,"" "we depend on each other for our sadness." Chang's lines are immediate and affecting; much like Martin's radiant paintings, they exist to be seen and felt, read and absorbed.

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June 1, 2024

In her first volume of poetry after the Anisfield-Wolf Award-winning OBIT, Chang deftly embodies the anomie and emptiness that is depression via a considered look at the artwork of minimalist painter Agnes Martin, having been commissioned by New York's Museum of Modern Art to write a poem about Martin's "On a Clear Day" print series. Martin's carefully crafted grids are fitting emblems of the poet's reduced state, her boxed-in, fragmented interior life. While "On a Clear Day, 1973" commemorates the eight people (including six Asian women) killed in the 2021 Atlanta shootings, and a middle section inspired by conceptual artist On Kawara elegizes her father, Chang focuses not on roots but affect ("wandering itself is depression" as we try to locate it) and the inarticulate, unfathomable ever-presentness of mental health crisis. Friendship becomes just "cut flowers. Dissertations / on misunderstanding" and looking back shows that "all we / remember are / the equal and / divided / sadnesses," as exemplified by Martin's rectangles." VERDICT Though Chang finally concedes that "My error was to become what / I wanted to be, not its tone," there's no easy understanding here. She's grappling, and readers will too, but her refusal to trade in clich� makes this book stand out.

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