with my back to the world (Awarded, Forward Prizes for Best Collection)

Victoria Chang
(Corsair Poetry, 2024); pbk, £12.99

On the Poetry Foundation website, ekphrastic poetry is defined as ‘the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture” which in turn ‘may amplify and expand its meaning.’ Metaphor’s imaginative carrying over of the qualities of one dissimilar state or entity to another, brings hidden, unexpected richness. Both bridging transfers of one from the other carry risks. What do these two statements have to do with Victoria Chang’s with my back to the world?  

Divided into three sections—with a middle section written in the form of a diary of her father’s death and its aftermath—Chang’s collection conducts an an extended conversation with the abstract American artist Agnes Martin, using her canvases and titles as the starting point for reflections on depression, identity, grief, and art as line making (much like writing). Chang’s writing is richly meditative, deliciously puzzling, and surreal… a poetry collection of aphoristic lines, moving between and betwixt states, including that of poetry and prose. Chang also includes pictorial versions of her own poems obscured or written over. 

One primary theme is how to describe, engage with and explore subjective states. These are sometimes personified in contemporary fashion, for example, solitude ‘grabs my phone and take a selfie, posts it/ somewhere for others to see and like’. Moods might also be made material and thing-like; in ‘Leaves, 1966), she writes,

On some days, my depression is over there in a picnic basket while I am
over here looking at art… On those days, the ants are closer

To my depression than I am. When one finds it, it sends all the ants to it.
They cut up my depression, lift it away to feed a queen.

… I always think it’s gone . But it regrows each night. It has skin.

Through a rhetorical carrying over, internal states are rendered external. Ants, leaves, grasses – all things that seem to foreground multiplicity, fragments and small multiples are threaded through with my back to the world. The self alienated and divested from herself, finds her fit in Agnes Martin’s grid of boxes, and readers are asked to ponder whether the boundaries imprison, keep in or keep out or do both simultaneously. Beyond small boxes and grids, there are lines, columns or even fragments that dissolve; in ‘Song, 1962’, the poem starts with the 384 rectangles from Martin’s canvas and ends with the narrator eyeing Modigliani’s portrait of Beatrice Hastings, seeing the ‘distorted almond eyes, the orange-red cheeks’ and imagining the image mirroring herself—a Chinese woman seen—‘in fragments, on the pavement, looking up at the sky…. And then the wind blew everything but my expression away.’  The middle section, which deals with the trauma of her father’s dying, sees the narrator’s own shape in her father’s form, so much so that she wakes up in the casket with same injuries as her father. Later, she imagines his cremation in the retort as his reply. The guilt of not being able to save him, of seeing the effects of witholding food, is a gut-wrenching boomerang:

                                        … I read
about the pugilistic stance when they
burn the body, the boxer-like pose
the body makes. I think about my father,
along in the retort, in a small box,
two thousand degrees, his legs bent, his fist
ready to punch me and my live flesh.

While the first person is used repeatedly as if in confessional mode, Chang’s poems hollow out the metaphysics of  first person’s presence, and slides into… what? The grammatical ‘I’… to words… to language. The titular poem has, of course, already forewarned us,

This year I turned my back to the world. I let language face

The front. The parting felt like a death. The first person ran
away like a horse. When the first person left, there was no

Second or third person as I had originally thought. All that
remained was repetition. And blue things.

But Chang doesn’t let us forget this cautionary note throughout the collection—that all we have are words. And even these might yet fail is suggested in the poetry’s tonal vulnerability, its stops and starts, its fragments. In this way, the title’s preoccupation with how to encapsulate what it is that needs to be said elevates it away from simple confessional though, of course, the collection does bear witness to the intensity of emotional states. Then, ‘Play, 1966’ is all too aware of how writing might be read by others, ‘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.’

It is probably not simply happenstance exactly that Chang alights on Martin, an abstract artist, for both are preoccupied with the media they work in… and what results is a sustained intellectual and emotional query into how to express what is elusive… what isn’t easy to write of. Head and heart. In a recent interview, Chang has said, ‘Language is so unsatisfactory. You can’t really get to the thing you are feeling with language. You can get as close as you can…. So this book is trying to talk about the inadequacies of language.’ And much of this readers will be able to sense if not to logically transcribe from Chang’s writing and her work with images and the imagistic; for to banally paraphrase is to miss the work’s maddening richness. So for me, it’s a bold collection that achieves so much from its uncertainty, its continual ability to surprise, its imaginative yoking… all of which make with my back to the world such a creatively rewarding read. But all good books do that don’t they?

Gail Low