Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief

Product Description

A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Los Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021
A collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.

For poet Victoria Chang, memory “isn’t something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally.” It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.

Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.

In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination,
Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.

Review

Praise for Dear Memory

“Groundbreaking . . . Chang’s lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family’s time capsule and an artist’s timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem.”
—Thúy Dinh, NPR

“Chang’s work is excavation, a digging through the muck of society for an existential clarity, a cultural clarity and a general clarity of self.” —New York Times Book Review

“Both a chronicling of [Chang’s] family’s history and a powerful, stirring rumination on ancestry, inherited trauma and home.” —TIME Magazine, “Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2021”

“[Dear Memory is] a collage of fragments constituting a moving portrait of the poet herself.” —Los Angeles Times, “Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2021”

“Dear Memory is the work of a gifted poet, a wordsmith who is conscious that absent a chance to be an eyewitness to the past, we are left to spin our own webs of emotional significance and nostalgia.” —Lorraine Berry, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“After the impressive formal innovations of her 2020 book, OBIT, which won multiple national awards, Chang continues to find new ways to plumb her experiences on the page . . . Depending on what one brings to this book, each reader may find their own moment of goosebumps or tears . . . This book is moving in a way that transcends story and message; it captures a pure sense of another person’s heart.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “Chang has assembled a collection of letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as well as family memorabilia, creating not just a moving family history but a rumination on the creative and self-shaping act of remembering.” —Literary Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2021” “A moving consideration of ancestry and loss . . . [Chang’s] prose is sharp and strong—memory is the ‘exit wound of joy,’ she writes—and her creativity shines in her incorporation of the collage-like visual elements, which add depth. Fans of Chang’s poetry will be delighted.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review”These letters to the past that are paving stones to the future is the verdant ground that Victoria Chang explores in these, dare I say, memorable essays.” —Colorado Review

“Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory is a tender exploration of grief, an excavation into stories untold, memories unshared, the treasures that await our discoveries if we trace through the lives that held ours. It is a vulnerable and evocative experience of what it means to miss, to yearn, to return to the pieces of our most beloved.” —Kao Kalia Yang

“Those who were fans of Chang’s previous book, Obit, will find some similar (yet still refreshing) innovations of style and feeling in Dear M