The Trees Witness Everything

March 21, 2022
The elegant and reflective fourth collection from Chang (Obit) presents a moving elegy for both her deceased mother and the dying Earth, using form to capture the fleeting nature of life. Many of these poems are written as Japanese wakas-short, syllabic-based poems that give shape to a stark image or idea. They revolve around elements of the natural world-flora and fauna-often with spiritual connotations suggesting that nonhuman animals are just a hair's breadth from the divine: "I've watched so many spiders/ lift one last leg toward God." In moments like these, the poems seem like fragments of enlightenment collectively working toward a revelation. A longer poem titled "Marfa, Texas" explores the scenery and inhabitants of the city, with a focus on human-animal connections: "My day/ was this horse... This horse is also all the hours/ of my life that are unlived." The collection ends with a long poem titled "Love Letters," an ode to resilience in the face of profound loss, and the significant, necessary role that grief plays in life: "We are made of sorrow./ It threads through us and/ holds our organs together." For those who are grieving and those who have grieved, Chang offers beautiful insights, and a path toward healing.

June 15, 2022
Chang follows Obit (2020) with a new collection in four sublime parts. At the start, Chang works with a traditional Japanese form, waka, also known as tanka, or short poem, and adroitly uses titles of poems by W. S. Merwin as prompts, creating astonishingly subtle poems that gracefully bloom. In ""The String,"" she writes, "When the earth rotates, / a person not tied down with / longing falls off into space." The book's second section is ""Marfa, Texas,"" a long poem sculpted out of reflection on that enigmatic art mecca in the West Texas desert. Lines pop out: "Here, / you can pay someone to clip / off your shadow and walk it / across the border." Or ""Here, / when I cry in my head, my / tears come out as letters." The poet's dialog with Merwin continues in part three, ""The Shipwreck,"" as she offers "I sit at my desk. / Desire is an anchor-- / I lift it and words come up." Wildness is alive throughout in birds--hawks, crows, and wounded larks--along with crickets and beetles that appear between sentences. ""Love Letters"" closes this enlightened collection, which reads as an amalgam of buoyant messages from the pandemic we're all experiencing with lines like: "Don't forget what happened / last year--when you missed people / so much you let them in." Poetic wisdom past and present is very much alive here.

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