With My Back to the World: Poems

In her first volume of poetry after the Anisfield-Wolf Award–winning OBIT, Chang deftly embodies the anomie and emptiness that is depression via a considered look at the artwork of minimalist painter Agnes Martin, having been commissioned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art to write a poem about Martin’s “On a Clear Day” print series. Martin’s carefully crafted grids are fitting emblems of the poet’s reduced state, her boxed-in, fragmented interior life. While “On a Clear Day, 1973” commemorates the eight people (including six Asian women) killed in the 2021 Atlanta shootings, and a middle section inspired by conceptual artist On Kawara elegizes her father, Chang focuses not on roots but affect (“wandering itself is depression” as we try to locate it) and the inarticulate, unfathomable ever-presentness of mental health crisis. Friendship becomes just “cut flowers. Dissertations / on misunderstanding” and looking back shows that “all we / remember are / the equal and / divided / sadnesses,” as exemplified by Martin’s rectangles.”