Reviewed by: Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief by Victoria Chang Kathryn Savage Victoria Chang Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2021. 136 pages. I READ VICTORIA CHANG'S poetry collection Obit (Copper Canyon, 2020) after the death of my father. It was the only book that made sense to me. After his funeral, when his junk mail kept arriving at my house, when I saw his facial features forged in the sharp bones of my own, I turned to the book Chang wrote in the years after she lost her mother to pulmonary fibrosis and while her father's dementia continued to progress. Obit, as the name suggests, is written in the style of newspaper obituaries and includes obits to "civility," "approval," and "language." It is a spare and stunning book. The form is simultaneously constrained while also holding the keen of raw grief. In Edwidge Danticat's The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (Graywolf, 2017), she describes the dreams she had while her mother was dying from cancer. "In the days leading up to my mother's death, I would dream of running into my father unexpectedly at cocktail parties," she writes. Her father would be sharply dressed in the dreams, and they'd talk about how good the party was. "Dreams are sometimes portals of grief," she observes in The Art of Death, her book that is both an account of her mother's illness and a work of literary criticism. "Later I would realize that I was dreaming for my mother. In the dream, I was her. I was wearing her dress and it is even possible that I was also wearing her face." In Victoria Chang's latest book, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, the essayistic and epistolary function as portals of grief. This spare book belongs to a lineage of grief-works that meld personally voiced memoir with literary criticism—Naja Marie Aidt's When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back, Lara Mimosa Montes's Thresholes, and Terry Tempest Williams's When Women Were Birds come, most immediately, to mind. In Dear Memory, the first-person speaker addresses family members, teachers, the body, and even the Ford Motor Company, where Chang's father was employed. She writes to her grandmother and mother, who have both died. The letters are not nostalgic, solely peppered with fond moments together, but full of curiosity, brimming with questions. The desire to know more after death is poignant, felt, but never sentimental or overwrought. The epistolary functions in Dear Memory as a kind of intimate address. A way to keep the past close and the speaker actively engaged with it. Dear Memory is a more expansive project than Obit and a more collaged work; it includes many more autobiographical details about Chang's family. Her mother fled from China to Taiwan with her parents when she was a young girl and then left Taiwan for America when she was in her early twenties. Chang's parents raised her in a Michigan suburb. Her mother rarely spoke of her past. Over breakfast with another poet, whose mother had left her own country, speaking about trauma and their mothers, both writers observe that their mothers rarely spoke about their pasts to their children and that maybe it was the next generation, their generation, "who will write in response to that history." Throughout the pages of Dear Memory, letters pose questions to Chang's parents and grandparents about their lives before her birth. As Kamran Javadizadeh observers in his review of Dear Memory in the New Yorker, "Even the most basic facts about Chang's family's past remain mysterious to her: it is only by sorting through old documents that she learns her mother's birthday, her father's rarely used American name." How to mourn such losses? readers are asked to consider. Chang writes, "What form can express the loss of something you never knew but knew existed? Lands you never knew? People? Can one experience such a loss?" In the face of these ambiguous losses, Javadizadeh concludes, "the connection between them is an invention, an...