With My Back To The World

The pain I feel inside my chest is a heart's

change from a square to a rectangle. The stretching
hurts. The pain has something to do with solitude.
Today, I finally hear the

rectangle's first words which aren't words exactly. They
sound like something splashing.

Ambitious and intelligent, Victoria Chang's work investigates the expanse of human feeling patiently, deeply. In With My Back to the World, she heeds the grace of the lines and grids in Martin's art as steady guides, conducting a search through the intricacies of depression and grief; feminism and existentialism; desire and art. Chang's poems and illustrations have resounding power: after finding what lies within and beyond emptiness, and where pain and hope linger in the body, dimensions of meaning and being expand in this work of visual splendor.