What happens if these aren’t pastoral or war poems? When I can feelthe light I carry on my back but can’t see it or use it?When sadness and language cast the same shadow. These six strips arethe shadows of our blood, proving that every woman’s life canbe broken into and displayed. On some nights, if I zoom in to thepainting, they become three sets of lips. If I hold my phone nearmy mouth, I can feel three people breathing on my face. I made aneffort to unlove everyone, but all I received were these lips, slightlyopen. Today my eighty-year-old neighbor told me, Everythinghurts…you’ll see. I wanted to tell him that I already see. After adeath, the idea of a journey disappears. After two deaths, the journeydoubles. Maybe our bodies never had a vanishing point,so there will always be hunger. Even a woman’s life is trying tobecome more than the woman it represents.
Untitled #10, 2002
Feature Date
- October 27, 2023
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First published in The Kenyon Review, 45:3 (Summer ’23), pp. 188
Copyright © 2023 by Victoria Chang.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Victoria Chang’s forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World will be published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Corsair Books in the U.K. Her most recent book of poetry, The Trees Witness Everything, was published by Copper Canyon Press and Corsair Books in the U.K. in 2022, and was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by the New Yorker and The Guardian.
Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021 and was named a favorite nonfiction book of 2021 by Electric Literature and Kirkus. Her book OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) 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 also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. She serves as the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.
Summer 2023
Gambier, Ohio
Kenyon College
The David F. Banks Editor
Nicole Terez Dutton
Managing Editor
Abigail Wadsworth Serfass
Associate Editor
Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky
Poetry Editor
David Baker
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