The prose poems and tankas in Victoria Chang’s Obit are less traditional elegies than a series of verbal proofs through which Chang investigates those aspects of experience––grief, pain, love––that seem beyond our capacity to represent them. “Language fails us” more than once in this collection (it gets three obituaries of its own), and yet words are what the speaker of these poems must use both “to calculate my grief” and to convey it. These poems’ generous, meticulous record of grieving is inseparable from Chang’s retooling of poetic form and language.

A good writer drops readers miles from where they expected; great ones like Raphael Bob-Waksberg take readers just where they want to go, but when they arrive, the landscape doesn’t look how they remember.

But presently what interests me is my soul.
He’s been absent for weeks. He left one night
when the clouds flamed purple behind the lacy tree,

and usually he loves this type of thing.

My brother says his next tattoo will read Made in China,
even though he wasn’t. He tells people his birth name

is Ching Chong, which is a lie, and that he can’t speak
any language fluently except for English, which is true.