Finding strange comfort: Victoria Chang poetry notecard

The story behind an original letterpress poetry print of an excerpt by Victoria Chang, from "Love Letters," The Trees Witness Everything, Copper Canyon Press.

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There is a bird and a stone
in your body. Your job is not
to kill the bird with the stone.

Victoria Chang

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I gratefully received an early copy of Victoria's new book The Trees Witness Everything and read it quickly several months back. So many poems in it are so strong, and well suited to the small format I've been drawn to of late—thanks to the poet's own love of structure and constraint.

 As is often the case, a few lines stuck with me and I found myself repeating them out loud. It was on a walk with a good friend under big trees that I realized how deeply I'd been thinking about the bird and the stone, and what "not killing" could look like / should look like / might look like if I allowed it.

I find a strange comfort in these lines even though I really don't know what they mean. This is what I love about poetry—it eases my need to know and cuts great swathes through my thinking. It unfixes my mind and creates space to wonder.

I expect to be living and wondering with these lines a long time.

About Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang is the the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the Director of Poetry@Tech. Her books have won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. You can learn more about her on her website here.

Credits

The quoted lines above are from "Love Letters," The Trees Witness Everything, Copper Canyon Press. Copyright 2022 Victoria Chang. Used by permission. 

Thanks to Ryo Yamaguchi for acting as enthusiastic match-maker for this project, and to all at Copper Canyon for their unwavering partnership. Thanks also to Nhatt Nichols and Carolina Veenstra for echoing these lines back to me multiple times, usefully.