Quotes from Victoria Chang

Having children can be such a gift, but it can be a crushing experience for a certain kind of mom. And I am that certain kind of mom.

Most people are trying to go digital, and trying to do different things with poetry. McSweeney's is going in the opposite direction - going more classic, and retro, which is all coming back.

My gut was always that if I taught students poetry, I would give too much of myself to them and have nothing left.

I've always felt alone and isolated, and living on the West Coast, there's no poetry community out here, and if there is, it's really spread out - because it's LA, it's spread out.

My life all-around is really different than a lot of other poets. Not poets that are parents, too, but just that I can hardly find anyone who works in the industries that I've worked in.

We're all just a part of this large, spiraling, constantly fluid hierarchy and changing. At some points in your life, you feel crushed by that, depending on who you come in contact with.

I think I love humor in poetry, but not that slapstick cheap easy humor, but that uncomfortable, "did she say that out loud?" kind of humor.

I love being part of poetry conversations. I love talking about what I've read.

As I published books, I realized, that's not really what I want. I don't care about the books as much anymore. I just want to write poetry.

I question my own talent and ability to make creative work every single day.

I do think that given my background as a poet, and also I work in a different field, you're sort of neither here nor there.

Blame has no face. I have walked on its staircase, around and around, trying to slap its face but only hitting my own cheeks.

If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue frame, place it faceup on the floor of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief.

I now know that to be loved as child means to be watched. In high school, I loved when the teacher turned the lights off. A moment to feel loved and unseen at once. I understand now. We can't be loved when the lights are off.

The way memory is the ringing after a gunshot. The way we try to remember the gunshot but can't. The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.

To love anyone means to admit extinction. I tell myself this, so I never fall in love, so that the fire lights just me.

I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn't know that it's not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.

Blame is just an echo of pain, a veil across the face of the one you blame. I blame God. I want to complain to the boss of God about God. What if the boss of God is rain and the only way to speak to rain is to open your mouth to the sky and drown?

She switched places with her shadow because suffering changes shape and happens secretly.

Before my mother's death, I sat anywhere. Now I look for the image of the empty chair near the image of the empty table. An image of me sits down. Depression is a glove over the heart. Depression is an image of a glove over the image of a heart.

I know the heart doesn't really shatter, but I also can no longer feel it.

Depression is a glove over the heart. Depression is an image of a glove over the image of a heart.

Sometimes all I have are words and to write them means they are no longer prayers but are now animals. Other people can hunt them.

To acknowledge death is to acknowledge that we must take another shape.