The Trees Witness Everything

Author: Victoria Chang
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 161932251X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 78

Book Description
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.

Witness Tree

Author: Lynda Mapes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1632862530
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
An intimate look at one majestic hundred-year-old oak tree through four seasons--and the reality of global climate change it reveals. In the life of this one grand oak, we can see for ourselves the results of one hundred years of rapid environmental change. It's leafing out earlier, and dropping its leaves later as the climate warms. Even the inner workings of individual leaves have changed to accommodate more CO2 in our atmosphere. Climate science can seem dense, remote, and abstract. But through the lens of this one tree, it becomes immediate and intimate. In Witness Tree, environmental reporter Lynda V. Mapes takes us through her year living with one red oak at the Harvard Forest. We learn about carbon cycles and leaf physiology, but also experience the seasons as people have for centuries, watching for each new bud, and listening for each new bird and frog call in spring. We savor the cadence of falling autumn leaves, and glory of snow and starry winter nights. Lynda takes us along as she climbs high into the oak's swaying boughs, and scientists core deep into the oak's heartwood, dig into its roots and probe the teeming life of the soil. She brings us eye-level with garter snakes and newts, and alongside the squirrels and jays devouring the oak's acorns. Season by season she reveals the secrets of trees, how they work, and sustain a vast community of lives, including our own. The oak is a living timeline and witness to climate change. While stark in its implications, Witness Tree is a beautiful and lyrical read, rich in detail, sweeps of weather, history, people, and animals. It is a story rooted in hope, beauty, wonder, and the possibility of renewal in people's connection to nature.

Barbie Chang

Author: Victoria Chang
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619321793
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 117

Book Description
"With astringent understatement and wry economy, with nuance and intelligence and an enviable command of syntax and poetic line, Victoria Chang dissects the venerable practices of cultural piety and self-regard. She is a master of the thumbnail narrative. She can wield a dark eroticism. She is determined to tackle subject matter that is not readily subdued to the proportions of lyric. Her talent is conspicuous."—Linda Gregerson "Chang's voice is equal parts searing, vulnerable, and terrified."—American Poets Barbie Chang, Victoria Chang explores racial prejudice, sexual privilege, and the disillusionment of love through a reimagining of Barbie—perfect in the cultural imagination yet repeatedly falling short as she pursues the American dream. This energetic string of linked poems is full of wordplay, humor, and biting social commentary involving the quote-unquote speaker, Barbie Chang, a disillusioned Asian-American suburbanite. By turns woeful and passionate, playful and incisive, these poems reveal a voice insisting that "even silence is not silent." From "Barbie Chang Lives": Barbie Chang lives on Facebook has a house on Facebook street so she can erase herself Facebook is a country with no trees it allows her to believe people love her don't want to cover her Barbie Chang . . . Victoria Chang is the author of three previous poetry books. In 2013, she won the PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Chang teaches poetry at Chapman University and lives in Southern California.

Obit

Author: Victoria Chang
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619322188
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 118

Book Description
The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020 Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 NPR's Best Books of 2020 National Book Award in Poetry, Longlist Frank Sanchez Book Award After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of “the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.” These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died (“civility,” “language,” “the future,” “Mother’s blue dress”) and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living. "When you lose someone you love, the world doesn’t stop to let you mourn. Nor does it allow you to linger as you learn to live with a gaping hole in your heart. Indeed, this daily indifference to being left behind epitomizes the unique pain of grieving. Victoria Chang captures this visceral, heart-stopping ache in Obit, the book of poetry she wrote after the death of her mother. Although Chang initially balked at writing an obituary, she soon found herself writing eulogies for the small losses that preceded and followed her mother’s death, each one an ode to her mother’s life and influence. Chang also thoughtfully examines how she will be remembered by her own children in time."—Time Magazine

Salvinia Molesta

Author: Victoria M. Chang
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820331767
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 105

Book Description
Victoria Chang's collection takes its title from what many call "the worst weed in the world," a plant so rapidly and uncontrollably invasive that it is illegal to sell or possess in the United States. Chang explores this image of vitality and evil in three thematically grouped sections focusing on corporate greed, infidelity and desire, and historical atrocities, including the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in China and the massacre of Chinese people in Nanking by Japanese troops in World War II. This edgy, fierce subject matter becomes engaging and fresh as Chang applies her powers of imagination to the extraordinary lives of Madame Mao, investment banker Frank P. Quattrone, and others living at extraordinary historical moments. In "Seven Stages of Genocide," for example, the poem's speaker is herded into a death camp along with a neighbor that he strongly dislikes: "The barbed wire around us forces me / to catch his breath that smells like goose." Chang focuses her attention to occurrences in the world that many poets find too violent or disturbing to write about, thereby making her own distinctive aesthetic from that which is, like Salvinia molesta, both creepy and beautiful.

Casting Deep Shade

Author: C. D. Wright
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781556595486
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
In the face of loss--past, present, and future--C.D. Wright's final work demonstrates the power of words to conserve, preserve, and witness.

The Witness Tree

Author: Amy Pendino
Publisher: Wise Ink
ISBN: 9781634891455
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
A tree in rural Iowa bears witness to generations of human experience--and deadly secrets.

The Giving Tree

Author: Shel Silverstein
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061965103
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

Book Description
As The Giving Tree turns fifty, this timeless classic is available for the first time ever in ebook format. This digital edition allows young readers and lifelong fans to continue the legacy and love of a classic that will now reach an even wider audience. "Once there was a tree...and she loved a little boy." So begins a story of unforgettable perception, beautifully written and illustrated by the gifted and versatile Shel Silverstein. This moving parable for all ages offers a touching interpretation of the gift of giving and a serene acceptance of another's capacity to love in return. Every day the boy would come to the tree to eat her apples, swing from her branches, or slide down her trunk...and the tree was happy. But as the boy grew older he began to want more from the tree, and the tree gave and gave and gave. This is a tender story, touched with sadness, aglow with consolation. Shel Silverstein's incomparable career as a bestselling children's book author and illustrator began with Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back. He is also the creator of picture books including A Giraffe and a Half, Who Wants a Cheap Rhinoceros?, The Missing Piece, The Missing Piece Meets the Big O, and the perennial favorite The Giving Tree, and of classic poetry collections such as Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, Falling Up, Every Thing On It, Don't Bump the Glump!, and Runny Babbit. And don't miss the other Shel Silverstein ebooks, Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic!

The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees

Author: Robert Penn
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141977523
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Robert Penn cut down an ash tree to see how many things could be made from it. After all, ash is the tree we have made the greatest and most varied use of over the course of human history. Journeying from Wales across Europe and Ireland to the USA, Robert finds that the ancient skills and knowledge of the properties of ash, developed over millennia making wheels and arrows, furniture and baseball bats, are far from dead. The book chronicles how the urge to understand and appreciate trees still runs through us all like grain through wood.

Love, Love

Author: Victoria Chang
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
ISBN: 1454938331
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
In this beautiful novel in verse, a Chinese-American girl contends with school bullies, tries to solve the mystery of her sister's strange illness, and finds strength and validation at the local tennis court. Frances Chin, a 10-year old Chinese-American girl, lives in the suburbs of Detroit with her immigrant parents and older sister, Clara. At school Frances copes with bullies and the loneliness that comes with not quite fitting in. At home, she feels a different kind of aloneness. Her parents are preoccupied with work and worry about Clara, whose hair is inexplicably falling out. But, with the help of her friend Annie, Frances is determined to play Nancy Drew and solve the mystery of Clara’s condition. She also faces the everyday challenges and unexpected thrills of being a tween, especially when she receives encouragement from a tennis coach. Although she struggles to speak up, Frances’s powerful inner voice resonates in gorgeous imagery and evocative free verse. "Love and more love to Victoria Chang for her lyrical and gentle prose poems that, in excavating a deep secret, usher readers beyond shame and into the warmth of understanding." —Thanhhà Lại, New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Inside Out & Back Again, and most recently Butterfly Yellow