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Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief
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About This Book
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 simultaneously 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.
Reviews
"There may be one clear point of connection between the image and the words — in that first collage, the phone that Chang notes is ringing is the phone hanging on the wall in the photograph — but these connections are either too literal or virtually nonexistent."
"Each letter is composed of imagery, remembrances, and poetic aphorisms."
"In one of their conversation's most wrenching moments, Chang's mother recalls a memory from her journey to Taiwan ..."
"As Chang recounts the death of her mother and what it means to remember, her prose is sharp and strong and her creativity shines in her incorporation of the collage-like visual elements, which add depth."
"This book is moving in a way that transcends story and message; it captures a pure sense of another person's heart."
"The photo collages she assembles gesture toward the ways we create our pasts ..."
"While structurally complex, Dear Memory articulates grief's basic anxieties ..."
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