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The Trees Witness Everything - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Trees Witness Everything

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A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life’s hardest questions: how to let go.

In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” each poem is shaped by pattern and count. This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name—with reverence, economy, and whimsy—the ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.

ISBN-13: 9781556596322

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Publication Date: 04-26-2022

Pages: 144

Product Dimensions: 3.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

Born in Detroit, Michigan to Taiwanese immigrants, Victoria Chang was educated at the Universityof Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford Business School and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson. She is the author of six books of poetry, including Obit, which was named a "New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020" and included on Time Magazine's "100 Must-Read Books of 2020." She lives in Southern California with her family and serves as the Program Chair of Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program.

Read an Excerpt

Green Fields

I was supposed to return to the fields daily.
I haven’t been there since birth. On some nights, I smell smoke that I think is the field, but when I follow it, there is just a clothesline with half my life clipped on it, drying in the sun.


Strawberries

Mother brought a spray bottle to pick strawberries.
She made us spray them before eating. I never cared that hundreds of red eyes watched me as I took my first bite. They all knew that the war had begun,
that June began the killing.


My Other Dark

I imagine my life as a Chinese Empress,
proud of my face, eyes.
Even the moon has black hair,
mountaintops of Chinese snow.
In this life, I am nothing.


Turning

My mother is dead.
The lemons still turn yellow,
the trout still stare emptily,
desire is still free.
We still love many people,
eat peaches as if kissing.


When the War is Over

I once saw the deer.
They were all wearing blue scarves.
We have finally finished killing everything.
We are now looking ahead,
but have killed past the future.


Snowfall

We say the snow falls,
but the snow really seizes.
Because it is light,
it takes seven years to grab.
By the time it does,
the old wars are over and my mother is dead.
But it lands on the new wars,
melts on another mother.


In the Open

The weather is wet,
the weather doesn’t have joints.
How the snow just becomes rain,
what is that change called?
Trees witness everything, why do they always look away?


Lives of the Artists

I brush my hair and wonder if you are watching.
I write a word and attach it to a speaker—
someone please listen.
Words come out of my coffin,
made of maple. When empty, it will return to the trees who speak to no one.


The Lovers

There is a wildfire starving on top of a lake.
See how the water holds fire,
but cannot end it?
Why do we insist on love,
when all we want is mercy.