Tree of Knowledge: Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry 2026 (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

A hole where a tree once was isn't formless, emptiness is an accumulation of everything once there.

A poet watches the limbs of a eucalyptus tree get sawed off: the image persists, recurring across poems of art, language, selfhood, memory, and loss

Joan Mitchell said, When I talk about love, I mean loving a tree. When I talk about love, I mean loving where a tree used to be.

Men assess the eucalyptus tree growing on the poet's street; a crane arrives. The sound of a chainsaw rings in the air and branches begin to fall. This tree-cutting haunts the poet, and refracts across the remarkable work collected in Tree of Knowledge as Chang turns her thoughts to artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell and most notably Hilma af Klint.

Roving, evocative, and intricate, Tree of Knowledge is rooted in Victoria Chang's crystalline voice and generous, probing gaze, and by certain images - trees, a hanging figure, a branch, fingertips, a briefcase - that resurface like apparitions.

'Chang's latest collection continues her engagement with visual art [...] creating space for Chang to meditate on language, grief and our relationship to history . . . Evocative' Guardian

'Chang changes the way readers see art, the world, and themselves in this contemplative epic that rivals the major works of Wallace Stevens and A. R. Ammons' Library Journal