Today’s GalleyCrush is Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions on October 12, 2021.
Perfect pitch: “From poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.”
First lines: “I hear the phone ringing / but I can’t answer it. / It is silence calling.”
Book buzz: “Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory is a tender exploration of grief, an excavation into stories untold, memories unshared, the treasures that await our discovery if we trace 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
Book notes: Hardcover, nonfiction, 168 pages.
Cover credit: Art by Victoria Chang, design by Mary Austin Speaker.
Author bio: Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT, Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. OBIT received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN/Voeckler Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She is also the author of a children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, illustrated by Marla Frazee, and named a New York Times Notable Book, and a middle-grade novel, Love, Love. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Katherine Min MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch University’s low-residency MFA program.
