Vorwort
Large galley quantities available for Winter Institute and ALA Midwinter follow-up, as well as PGW sales force, Indie Next campaign, major media, and influencers Major galley send to influencers in the literary community, including Ocean Vuong and Maggie Smith Major advertising campaign in Shelf Awareness, O, the Oprah Magazine, Artforum, and Poets & Writers Promotional partnership with PNBA with targeted advertising and promotions to Pacific Northwest booksellers and readers; featured title at PNBA Fall Conference in October 2021 Digital marketing through the publisher to communities of more than 30K readers and buyers, including special pushes to academic and sales communities Reader's Guide available for download from the publisher Preorder campaign and partnership with Green Apple bookstore Essay by the author published on the publisher blog and promoted to newsletter list of more than 20K readers, as well as across social media channels Major virtual tour, with up to fifteen events scheduled in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and New York, with a focus on literary festivals

Autorentext

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems, With My Back to the World, received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection and was named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Obit received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN/Voelcker 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. Other recent books include The Trees Witness Everything and several children’s books. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the Director of Poetry@Tech.

Klappentext

"Groundbreaking . . . Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." —NPR

Now in paperback, from the poet who “resurrects mediums” (The Millions), a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.  

For poet Victoria Chang, memory “isn’t something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally.” It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered. 

Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.

In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.

Zusammenfassung
"Victoria Chang is consistently a poet who resurrects mediums." -THE MILLIONS

Leseprobe
Dear Grandmother,

Today I found a Certificate of Marriage and a translation of it by the President Translation Service. The date is July 26, 1939. Now I know your name: Miss Chang Chi-Yin. I also know you were 27 and Grandfather 26. I wonder if this was considered strange at the time, your being older than him.

I now know you were born on April 29, 1913. Seeing this date makes me cry. The tears are long and rusted. I have tried to tie them together into a long string toward your country. The farthest I've ever made it was Kansas. The tornadoes always break my tears.

Dear Grandmother, I now know you were born in Chingwan Hsien, Hopei Province. I google Hopei and see it is in the North of China, where all the good doughy food Mother used to make comes fromthe bao zi, jiao zi, and shao bing. I can see how close you were to Beijing and Mongolia.

I learn that you were born one year after the Qing dynasty collapsed. I learn that you lived amid civil war. I wonder if this is why you took your children and left for Taiwan.

I can't find your town, Chingwan Hsien, on Google because it's probably spelled another way. After more searching, I figure out it is likely Jing Wan Xian. But I still can't locate it on the map of Hopei, which I figure out is also Hebei Province.

The Certificate says you were united in matrimony at Chungking City, Szechuan Province. Google says there are thirty million people there. I try to imagine thirty million people who look like me. In that moment, grief freezes.

The Certificate says you were introduced to each other by Mr. Chang Kan-Chen and Mrs. Chou Chi-Ying. I wonder who these people were. I wonder if yours was an arranged marriage or if you loved each other. Or both. I wonder what love looked like in China in 1939.

The Certificate says: These two parties are now united forever in harmony on this auspicious day in taking an oath of mutual fidelity throughout their lives. What happened afterwards, I don't know. I do know that when I met you, the one time I met you, you were no longer together and hadn't been in a long time. But Mother never talked about that. Mother only ever bitterly talked about how you favored all of your sons.

The one time I met your former spouse, my grandfather, was when Mother brought me to the arcade to meet him. I played Ms. Pac-Man the whole time, while they stood near the door and talked. Their mouths moved but I couldn't hear anything. All I remember is the sound of the yellow mouth eating white pellets.

I often think about what the poet Mary Jo Bang wrote about her dead son, What is elegy but the attempt/To rebreathe life/Into what the gone once was/Before he grew to enormity. That is what Mother feels like: an enormity. My history feels even larger. The size of atmosphere.

An elegy reflects on the loss of a loved one. What form can express the loss of something you never knew but knew existed? Lands you never knew? People? Can one experience such a loss? The last definition of absence is the nonexistence or lack of. See how the of hangs there like someone about to jump off a balcony?

I want to believe in the origin story. I want to believe we all desire to know how we came to be, who we came from. I want to know why my fingers are so long, why my mouth naturally frowns, why my back has chronic pain, why I have freckles all over my nose. Why my mind is so restless.

But what if, during her own migration, my mother's memories migrated, too, and became exiled from their origins? What if both my origin and memory can never be pinned down?

Grandmother, in the list of people present during your marriage, there were two matchmakers, three parents, and a witness. Where was the fourth parent? I now know the names of three of my ancestors: Jin Hsuan-San, Chang Yen-Chen, Pi Pao-Chuan. I also have a photocopy of the original marriage certificate in Chinese. I now know your names in Chinese characters, though I can't read them well.

My mother had a photocopy of each of these documents. And then she made another copy of the copies. So many copies to forget her past. If I throw them away, does that mean I was never born? In some ways, being born Chinese in America means not being born at all.

Maybe all of our memories are tied to the memories of others. Maybe my memories are tied to Mother's mem…