Description

WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST POETRY COLLECTION 2024

‘Chang has liberated the Ekphrastic form to new lyric heights and depths. Inventive, meditative, audacious, strange and soulful. A marvel of a collection that engages the eye and mind as much as the ear and heart’ Raymond Antrobus

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, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang’s new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.

With My Back to the World won the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection on the 10th October 2024

Publisher Review

‘In Agnes Martin’s grid paintings, each pale rectangle can feel like an hour, a day, or a year. The effect of all these small variations seen at once approximates the overwhelming fact of other lives. With My Back to the World gives Victoria Chang that same kind of quiet, intimate, constrained but infinite room to work in. This book is the record of an artful, attentive mind, full of startling insights (“My solitude is like the grass. I become so aware of its presence that it too begins to feel like an audience”), a testament to care, integrity, and persistence’ * Elisa Gabbert * ‘Victoria Chang’s lucid and playful poetry surprised and moved me with its friendly abundance of Koanlike lines-stimulating yet calming news from the dreamy outskirts of human consciousness’ * Tao Lin * The painterly, meditative latest from Chang (after Circle) enters in a dialogue with the visual artists Agnes Martin and On Kawara . . . This collection is full of memorable insights as Chang experiments with erased and occluded work, all the while operating in the realm of feeling, where “desire is the only thing/ with nerve endings.” These elegiac poems thoughtfully balance the head and the heart * Publishers Weekly (starred review) * Throughout this exhilarating collection Chang’s own illustrations parallel the energy her writing
conveys… Chang’s lines are immediate and affecting… they exist to be seen and felt, read and absorbed * Booklist (starred review) * ‘Chang has liberated the Ekphrastic form to new lyric heights and depths. Inventive, meditative, audacious, strange and soulful. A marvel of a collection that engages the eye and mind as much as the ear and heart’ * Raymond Antrobus *