I didn't dislike this, just not the right time for me to sit down with it and get through it all.

This book was recommended to me by Book Riot's Tailored Book Recommendation service. It was an excellent if uncomfortable read. A collection of obituaries to all the big and little losses after the author's mother dies, and her father experiences a series of strokes. Such a complicated rendering of grief. ( )

The recovery of past voices in the wide spatial area in Victoria Chang's Obit

A Cognitive Approach

Dr. Mohammed Sameer Abd Elsalam

In her poetic discourse, in Obit, Victoria Chang weaves an explanatory-rhetorical link between the themes of death, delayed death, and aesthetic resurrection in the context of communication between the self and the deep levels of the existence of others or the living dead in the experimental cosmic spatial void in the poem. Therefore, according to Victoria Chung, the spatial void is rich in specters, images, memories, and vivid daydreams that continually follow delayed death.

Consequently, Victoria Chung puts us within experimental contextual indicators related to time, place, and the image of the other. The temporal contextual indicator combines the power of the past moment and its possible transformation in the future towards another hypothetical life in the consciousness and subconsciousness of the self and its internal visual-spatial perception methods. As for the spatial contextual indicators, they were manifested in the poetic mixing between the places of endings and the places of other aesthetic presence that mix with the other or replace them. As for the indicator of the other, it appeared in his other experimental presence in the inner world of the self, and in the return of the mother’s impact within her and in her language mixed with the mother’s words that resist the centrality of death.

Moreover, We can deduce the mental state of the self through the spatial perceptual mixing between the images of the father and the mother, the old self-states, the transformations of concepts, cities, things, and the structure of presence in which death actually occurred, but that death came within a wide spatial void that contains the resurrection of living memory signs and includes a substitution state for the decentralized negative silence in the scene The vast cosmos.

Also, we can deduce some internal mental representations in Victoria Chang's discourse related to the images of father and mother and objects in their new metaphorical presence; From a perceptual-semantic perspective, we note that Victoria Chang's choice of the mother's tooth sign, which she temporarily placed inside her mouth, indicates the living occultation recovered from memory. This invisibility that lies behind the lips and the mouth indicates the depth of the presence of the image of the mother and the other father within the self and indicates the semantic pictorial fanfare between the delayed revealing of the teeth in the event of death, and the return of the teeth behind the mouth in a new spiritual image at the same time. We also notice that the death of the metaphorical ocean has been associated with the life of other waters in the body and soul of the self. Hence, the spatial domains of the images of the self, the other, and the objects are multiplied and indicate the richness of the vertical spiritual world in the perceptual landscape.

In addition, I believe that the main inferential argument in Victoria Chang's speech is based on the relative validity of the hypothesis of the possibility of a deep connection between the self and the absent other through the power of signs of memory, dreaming, and daydreaming, and then the result is the multiplicity of states of existence, and the transcendence of the centrality of the void and the trend towards mixing the invisible space with visual and virtual creative data.

Also, I believe that Victoria Chang's poetic discourse includes a directive speech act for us related to paying attention to the possibility of renewing signs of memory within the complex process that relates to the repetition of the daily cycles of existence and the internal cycles of existence.

Finally, I see that Victoria Chang has presented a unique poetic work in the history of literature, which contributes to discovering the possible life of the signs and sounds of the past.

Dr. Mohammed Sameer Abd Elsalam
Literary Critic and Art Critic ( )

Each poem is an obituary. Obit is a good read for anyone processing the grief of loss in the midst of the current pandemic.

I don't read much modern poetry, but I picked up this collection because I was intrigued by its premise. Poet Victoria Chang writes about the deaths of her parents in many poems that take on the formal attributes of old-fashioned newspaper obituaries. I found the "obit" poems the most accessible and moving. Other poems focus on words and phrases connected only by spaces. These didn't work as well for me, perhaps because I was unsure how to interpret them.

All in all, this is a noteworthy collection that touches upon dementia, loss, and grief. ( )