Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief

"Groundbreaking . . . Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." -NPRNow in paperback, from the poet who “resurrects mediums” (The Millions), a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations. For poet 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 Memory is not a transcription but a process of shaping and being shaped, knowing tha