With My Back to the World

Victoria Chang's most recent book of poems is, With My Back to the World (Corsair, 2024). A few of her recent books of poetry include The Trees Witness Everything and OBIT, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as longlisted for the National Book Award. Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief was published in 2021. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

'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'