With My Back to the World: Poems

Available
4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world
Product Details
Price
$26.00  $24.18
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publish Date
Pages
112
Dimensions
6.1 X 8.7 X 0.8 inches | 0.65 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780374611132

Earn by promoting books

Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.

Become an affiliate
About the Author
Victoria Chang's forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World, will be published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her latest book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), her prior book of poems, was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Must-Read Book, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also longlisted for a National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Literature Award. She is the Bourne Chair of Poetry at Georgia Tech and the Director of Poetry@Tech.
Reviews

"A poignant, powerful poetry collection that uses the work of American abstract painter Agnes Martin to tackle themes of grief, loss, the loneliness of the human experience, yet also the hopefulness of the human experience, as well. You will find yourself underlining so many of Chang's beautiful verses, along with quietly smiling at her wit."
--Isaac Fitzgerald (Today Show pick)

"The poems in Victoria Chang's With My Back to the World explore unwelcoming metaphysical depths, fearlessly probing the self, existence, life, death, and depression. Her lyrical strategy . . . allows her to create a new space, a place where depression and grief can be accepted rather than rejected or stigmatized . . . [With My Back to the World] proffers a valuable invitation to readers to look at realms of the self that they would prefer to ignore."
--Nicole Yurcaba, The Arts Fuse

"Chang thrives at embodying and vocalizing universal feelings of anxiety, joy, grief, fear, and wonder. Further, it's as if readers of her poetry are invited to visit a theater designed to accommodate a form or tradition with which she is obsessed . . . [With My Back to the World] is fully engaged with Agnes Martin's paintings, drawings, and writings . . . Chang expertly probes the limitations of art's ability to offer comfort or satisfaction."
--David Roderick, Poets & Writers

"[The poems of With My Back to the World] are resounding interactions between poet and painter. Chang's distress not only permeates the scored rectangles of Agnes Martin's canvas, but bleeds along its edges to saturate every poem . . . A multi-layered, complicated canvas where grief drawn onto a preconceived happiness illuminates a marked, nuanced expression of both, giving way to a reanimated artistry."
--Kale Kim, International Examiner

"The magnetism of Chang's language will convince you of the power of her project . . . Again and again, there's the moment of recognition that readers come to poetry for: Here is a feeling you know well, but have never been able to witness outside of yourself. Isn't it liberating to put these words to it? Don't you feel less alone in your loneliness?"
--Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, BookPage (starred review)

"Painterly, meditative . . . 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."
--Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"Victoria Chang's lucid and playful poetry surprised and moved me with its friendly abundance of Koanlike lines--stimulating yet calming news from the dreamy outskirts of human consciousness."
--Tao Lin, author of Leave Society

"In Agnes Martin's grid paintings, each pale rectangle can feel like an hour, a day, or a year. The effect of all these small variations seen at once approximates the overwhelming fact of other lives. With My Back to the World gives Victoria Chang that same kind of quiet, intimate, constrained but infinite room to work in. This book is the record of an artful, attentive mind, full of startling insights ("My solitude is like the grass. I become so aware of its presence that it too begins to feel like an audience"), a testament to care, integrity, and persistence."
--Elisa Gabbert, author of Normal Distance