Featuring Amina Cain, Karen Solie, Cecily Parks, and More
Attending a reading from Victoria Chang a few years ago, I remember her cheerful comment about how her new poems were a concerted effort to be about nothing, really. She then proceeded to read a piece that left a smoldering crater in the place of my heart. “Nothing, right?” she said with a smile. What makes Chang a remarkable poet is how, rather than lobbing missiles, her devastating existential bombshells seem to merely slip from her pocket while she leans forward to get a closer look at something we have given little more than a glance.
The death sentence for a eucalyptus on Chang’s block is her jumping off point for Tree of Knowledge. For Chang, the doomed eucalyptus and the eventual hole where it stood—a loss simultaneously random and brutal—is a portal through which to consider life, parenting, grief, menopause, depression, mortality, and so much else. With the initial loss of a massive branch: “It swayed like a woman // hanging from a gallows.” In another poem that follows, Chang describes the ways one dies from hanging, and the height by which she herself would need to fall to die cleanly on a rope. “The tree had a knife against its throat,” she writes early on, and the stakes of such a loss and how it is something a human can comprehend through scrutiny and empathy is much of these poems’ work.
