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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblah.

This is bookworm.

Welcome.

Today I'm speaking to a poet whose name is Victoria Chang. I read her for the first time after I read a review of

her new book in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The book is called Obit. It's published by the

wonderful poetry press, Copper Canyon, and I have been living in the wake of my parents' death

for some time and been living in an amalgam of grief and sorrow and memory loss. And this book, Obit, is a remarkable book about the death

of the poet's parents, written in the form of obities, of obituaries, brief obits.

Eventually, as the book proceeds, love dies, lost dies, language dies.

The death of the parent is the death of much of what we value in life if we allow ourselves to feel it.

Now, as I understand it, this book had a burst of creation that led to your writing poem after poem after poem.

What was that like?

It was exhausting, actually, but necessary. My mom died in August of 2015, and it was so incredibly

depressing in so many ways. And the typical things that happen to people, you know,

you just feel so, so bad, worse than you've ever felt and could imagine that you could ever feel.

...