Some books grow from a single image that will not leave. For Victoria Chang, one of them was a eucalyptus chopped down outside her window — a neighbourhood loss so ordinary it barely registers as history, until a poet decides it is. Another was the expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California, in 1885: after a white city councilman was killed by a stray bullet near Chinatown, a committee ordered roughly three hundred Chinese residents to leave within forty-eight hours. Ships carried 263 of them to San Francisco. The rest of the country preferred to forget. Tree of Knowledge, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2026, sets those two facts in the same soil and lets the roots tangle.
A decade of inventing instruments
Chang has spent ten years proving that form is not a cage but a way of thinking. Barbie Chang, Obit, The Trees Witness Everything, With My Back to the World — each collection invents its own instrument, driven by what one critic called her imaginative control of the image itself. This book arrives with an index of more than fifty artworks: Picasso, Joan Mitchell, Hilma af Klint (from whom the title partly draws), Renee Gladman, Ai Weiwei. Unexpectedly, it also includes Chang's own collages, forged from historical photographs. The art is not illustration. It is co-conspirator.
The long poem at the centre
At the core of the collection sits “Eureka,” an almost hermetic meditation — some twenty pages — on memory, meaning and a civic violence the West Coast has never fully named. Chang has lived with this history for years; she even wrote a middle-grade verse novel under the same title. The long poem is a more recent, denser response: not a documentary reenactment, but a working-through of what it means when a city decides who may remain under its trees. The felled eucalyptus outside her window and the emptied Chinatown start to rhyme. Knowledge, in this book, is less the fruit of the biblical tree than the cost of looking at the ground where something stood.
Menopause, grief, and the ordinary cut
Chang has spoken of the collection as a braid of menopause, grief, Chinese American history and the role of art in confronting loss. That range is the opposite of a theme park of identity. It is the honest map of a mind that refuses to keep the private wound and the public record in separate drawers. A tree comes down. A people are ordered out. A poet makes collages from the archive. The connections are not forced; they are what careful attention finds when it is allowed to stay in one place long enough.
On the Poetry Bench
American poetry is full of elegy. It is rarer to find elegy that also does the archival work of refusing a city's amnesia. Tree of Knowledge belongs on our Poetry Bench beside Dickinson's bee that sings, stings and flies and Jeffers hauling granite by hand — poets for whom form and fact are the same labour. The eucalyptus is gone. The poems are what grew in the light that followed. Chang, again, has built an instrument equal to the loss.