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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
"Mixing official documents, handwritten notes, photographs, and correspondence, she creates a moving consideration of ancestry and loss ..."
"the work of a gifted poet, a wordsmith who is conscious that absent a chance to be an eyewitness to the past, we are left to spin our own webs of emotional significance and nostalgia."
"The connection between them is an invention, an experimental grammar."
"Because one may try to speak intimately with Memory, but Memory may not necessarily speak back."
"Chang's poignant anecdotes on motherhood, from her own experience and others', can be read as tangible ways to illustrate memory's paradoxes ..."
"Chang uses image, metaphor, and pithy reflection in these short paragraphs to give the reader mental pictures— or shapes—of the ineffable things she describes."
"Depending on what one brings to this book, each reader may find their own moment of goosebumps or tears ..."
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