Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The pain I feel inside my chest is a heart's
change from a square to a rectangle. The stretching
hurts. The pain has something to do with solitude.
Today, I finally hear the
rectangle's first words which aren't words exactly. They
sound like something splashing.
Ambitious and intelligent, Victoria Chang's work investigates the expanse of human feeling patiently, deeply. In With My Back to the World, she heeds the grace of the lines and grids in Martin's art as steady guides, conducting a search through the intricacies of depression and grief; feminism and existentialism; desire and art. Chang's poems and illustrations have resounding power: after finding what lies within and beyond emptiness, and where pain and hope linger in the body, dimensions of meaning and being expand in this work of visual splendor.
Synopsis
A new collection of poetry inspired by the work of Agnes Martin, exploring topics of feminism, art, depression, and grief, by the author of the prizewinning collection Obit.
"Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square."
With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract modern artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, pleasingly strange, Victoria Chang's new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.