Dear Memory Av Victoria Chang

A Kirkus Best Book of October 2021Frompoet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.For 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 Memoryis 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 collages and missives on trauma, loss, and Americanness, Victoria Chang grasps on to a sense of self that grief threatens to dissipate.In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination,Dear Memoryoffers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.Other Honors forDear Memory:An Electric Literature Favorite Nonfiction Book of 2021ATIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021ALos Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021An NPR Most Anticipated Book of October 2021