How poet Victoria Chang handles grief using numbers

American poet Victoria Chang likes to count - the number of grids in an Agnes Martin painting, the syllables on her fingers, how many times her father fell after a stroke, the days leading up to his death.

- Shawn Hoo

"When I feel stressed, I start to breathe and count. It's a form of meditation - numbers are very soothing to me," says the 54-yearold daughter of a mathematics teacher and an engineer, and sister to a percussionist. She grew up in a "quantitative family".

Her mother died in 2015 from pulmonary fibrosis and her father died in 2022 after a debilitating stroke.

In her latest collection, With My Back To The World (2024), the poet's topics are depression and grief, and she has turned to the geometric abstraction of CanadianAmerican painter Martin (1912 to 2004) to work out her feelings.

Responding to dotted grids on an orange handkerchief-size paper, Chang writes: "Depression is a group of parallel lines that want to touch, but never can."

Replying to Martin's 1964 painting Drift Of Summer, in which Chang counts 44 vertical and 33 horizontal lines, she says: "I'm afraid to follow the lines to their ends because there might be nothing after or maybe something after is more terrifying."