Review: Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief
Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief
Victoria Chang
Milkweed Editions, 2021
“. . . one memory certainly hides another,
that being what memory is all about . . .”
Kenneth Koch, One Train May Hide Another
Inside this volume are trails, threads, snippets, snails. One leading to another, down corridors, alcoves under eaves. Chang works with memory from an archival perspective mixed with contemporary flashes. Like in Koch’s poem where train cars can be stand-ins for just about anything in life where we are blindsided, caught up in a cosmic chessboard of ever-moving pieces, memory is a cautionary tale. One memory leads to another to another, foregoing, preceeding, succumbing. She allows each to wash over her in a series of “letters,” which reveals to readers the nature of her relationship to individuals/family, to reality, to past and present. Chang’s memories intertwine with those of her mother, reflections of her father, snapshots of time spent in poetry workshops, using scrapbook/mixed materials to enhance her message. With a nod to the future, she addresses her daughters, acknowledging though they live in a more diverse society than she grew up in, that they will also face forms of racism, expectations imposed upon them—
Dearest Daughters, in your life, you will sometimes be the glove and sometimes the hand. But on some cold nights, you won’t be able to see your hands at all. On some nights, you might feel like the last person who shook your hand took your hand with them.
The last poem is to the reader, about the backward and forward of memory, how it is unwanted and necessary, how it speaks to us out of silence, how remembering and forgetting can be one and the same.
Dear Memory is a bridge for all of us, but especially
writers, to explore how memory, grief, and writing can work together as
catharsis.
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