Languages of Power, Poetics of Grief

i. Introduction

In an interview about his collection Time is a Mother, Ocean Vuong reveals that grief is the mode in which he writes. He states that while "not all [his] poems are mournful (...) they're haunted by the inevitability of death, and so the urgency and even the joys that come out of them" (Vuong, 2022). Indeed, loss saturates Time is a Mother. Written in the wake of his mother's passing, Vuong's collection positions grief as both its subject matter and its method of composition. As Henry Chandonnet observes in a review for Arts Fuse: "[Vuong] is not only meditating on the loss of his mother, but on the ways that writing and language facilitate (and enhance) the grieving process" (Chandonnet). This interwovenness of grief and language manifests most interestingly in the poem Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker. Taking the form of his mother's Amazon purchase history from her final months, her identity is reduced to her profession and her purchases. Yet, between this record of medical supplies, comfort items, and eventually funeral necessities, emerges something that impersonal, commercial language typically cannot contain — the love between mother and child, a portrait of sickness and loss, the hidden costs of immigrant life within American capitalism.

Within this poetic landscape, private loss becomes inseparable from social life. Vuong places the language of commerce in a dialogue with narratives of loss and survival; his mother's Amazon records reveal the costs of immigrant labor. The progression of her orders tells this story: what begins as routine purchases of salon supplies shifts to increasingly frequent orders of Advil and heat pads, marking how her illness became inseparable from the toll of her work. Here, the language of mourning does not simply console, but rather opens up spaces to engage with and interrogate larger histories.

For Vuong, this intersection of personal and historical grief is deliberate. As he states in the same interview, writing about these "private deaths" is "an extension of the work [he's] always done considering the aftermath of trauma, war, displacement, mass death" (Vuong). This approach to mourning goes beyond Vuong's work. As he further notes that many Asian writers share this "negotiation with death as self-knowledge", processing personal grief alongside collective histories of war and survival (Vuong). The following pages will examine how three contemporary Asian American poets — Ocean Vuong, Solmaz Sharif, and Victoria Chang — harness institutional forms to articulate what such systems typically erase: the dimensions of grief. Through their respective works Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker, Personal Effects, and Obit, they reshape various instances of institutional language, from purchase histories to military terminology to obituaries, into vessels for intimate expression. Far from constraining emotional depth, these formal structures create space for mourning to move between personal and collective experience.

In Personal Effects, Solmaz Sharif uses terminology from the US Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms to eulogize her uncle, who was killed in the Iran-Iraq war. She strips away the euphemism in phrases like FRONTAL ATTACK or SPREADING FIRE, revealing how military jargon attempts to sanitize violence. While certainly taut with political intensity, Sharif primarily transforms these terms into a vocabulary for grief. As David Baker writes in the Kenyon Review, Personal Effects is "not so much a "political" poem as an elegy. All [Sharif] wants is to meet her uncle, to say Hello and shake his hand, to know him. That is the pointed gesture toward which all the effort of the poem leads" (Baker).

Similarly, in her collection Obit, Victoria Chang adopts the language of obituaries to eulogize the death of her mother and father. By inverting the conventions of the obit, Chang suggests that loss fractures into countless smaller "deaths". The Kenyon Review positions this approach as an "anti-elegy", noting that where the elegy "lifts the poeticized subject", Chang archives what ripples from loss and transforms the living world ("Victoria Chang"). As such, Obit isn't so much a memorial of Chang's parents, but an implication of how one grief leads to countless others – both private and public. This web of loss culminates in the collection's final obituary, dated February 14, 2018 — the day of the Parkland shooting — where Chang writes of how "America—died on February 14, 2018, and my dead mother doesn't know" (Chang, 104).

While Vuong, Sharif, and Chang's approaches are all fundamentally elegiac – or written to mourn the dead – they also completely resist current scholarship's understanding of the genre. To analyze this resistance, I first turn to what constitutes an elegy. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "a song or poem of lamentation for the dead" or a "memorial poem". These definitions reveal a key distinction: unlike other poetic forms, the elegy is not defined through formal conventions. In fact, while traditional elegies do often employ particular elements, such as the pastoral setting or the movement toward consolation, contemporary elegies are fluid in their formal qualities. As the OED implies, what ultimately defines an elegy is its engagement with grief.

In critical theory, this engagement is understood through Sigmund Freud's Mourning & Melancholia, which defines two responses to loss: mourning (which moves from grief towards acceptance), and melancholia (which is a state that resists closure). In the English Elegy, Peter Sacks argues that the elegy is a form of Freudian mourning, where loss is poetically transformed into a "figurative or aesthetic compensation" (Sacks, 6). The poet's grief becomes generative, creating new figures and images to fill the absence left by death. This creative substitution culminates in moments of consolation through art or faith. An iconic example is Milton's Lycidas: the drowned shepherd becomes a divine guardian of the shore, an aesthetic substitution that compensates for the original loss (Milton).

In Poetry of Mourning, Jahan Ramazani challenges Sacks's theory by arguing that the contemporary elegy aligns more with Freudian melancholia. These works are fundamentally oppositional: "anti-sentimental, anti-institutional, and anti-abstract", choosing not to overcome but to sustain grief, not to heal but to reopen wounds (Ramazani, 16). For Ramazani, this shift emerges from the nature of modern loss itself, where the possibility of consolation seems too remote for traditional forms to suffice. An iconic example of this is Sylvia Plath's Daddy, where the speaker's grief for her father's death transforms into savage accusation. Rather than finding solace through substitution, the poem intensifies its initial anguish, ending with the violent image of a stake through the father's heart (Plath).

While Sacks' poetic mourning and Ramazani's melancholic recalcitrance map the evolution between traditional and modern elegiac approaches, neither framework accounts for Vuong, Sharif, and Chang's portrayals of loss. Rather than aligning with either consolation or desolation, these poets engage death dialectically, as both an immensely personal loss and a public form of cultural inheritance. Most significantly, while Ramazani sees modern elegies as anti-institutional, these poets turn to institutional language to reveal a modern experience of grief.

This use of bureaucratic terminology firstly acknowledges how institutional forms inevitably mediate experiences of loss in contemporary life. Secondly, it creates a tension between documentation and emotion, between public record and private grief. Finally, it allows these writers to turn the language of power back upon itself, using institutional form to express what it routinely fails to capture. Through these functions, Vuong, Sharif, and Chang create an elegiac mode that neither seeks nor rejects consolation, but rather transforms loss to act in dialogue with the dominant forces that propelled it. This transformation operates on multiple levels: the institutional record becomes simultaneously a document of power, an archive of erasure, and a means of remembrance. In Sharif's "Personal Effects," for instance, the title carries both its original military meaning (a service member's private belongings) and its elegiac resonance (the personal impact of loss). Vuong's Amazon purchase history functions as both a record of consumer transactions and a chronicle of his mother's final days. Chang's pieces adopt the newspaper obituary form, resisting its conventional form of public record and closure, to document the cascading smaller losses that accompany death.

ii. The Politics of Remembrance

Vuong, Sharif, and Chang's appropriation of bureaucratic and commercial forms demonstrates that language isn't a neutral system, but a contested social terrain. One where meaning can be reclaimed and repurposed, where the same words can signify differently when moved between institutional contexts to poetic ones, and where the tension between public and private can be productive for marginalized voices. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Valentin Volosinov argues this sentiment, writing: "the actual reality of language-speech is not the abstract system of linguistic forms, not the isolated monologic utterance, and not the psychophysiological act of its implementation, but the social event of verbal interaction implemented in an utterance" (Volosinov, 94). For Volosinov, language is fundamentally dialogic, emerging from the "concrete situation" of its use and the "immediate social situation" of its speakers (Volosinov, 85). Within this theoretical landscape, words gain significance not from dictionary definitions, but from their use in specific historical and material conditions. As Volonsinov writes: "every utterance is the product of the interaction between speakers and (...) the whole complex social situation in which the utterance emerges" (Volosinov, 79).

While Sacks and Ramazani root elegiac grief in individual loss, Volonsinov's framework insists that expressions of grief must be embedded in larger public dialogues. This dialogic quality means that expressions of grief are never purely personal statements but always implicitly addressed to others. In this framework, the language of mourning becomes a social act that connects individual experience to collective memory and shared meaning systems, or, as Volosinov writes: a "social event of verbal interaction". This dialogic understanding provides grounding for how Vuong, Sharif, and Chang transform institutional language. In appropriating these forms, these poets are not only making a stylistic choice, but dialogically renegotiating how loss is articulated within social and political contexts. When Vuong adopts the Amazon purchase records to chronicle his mother's decline, for example, he demonstrates how the private experience of illness intersects with systems of consumer capitalism and labor. Sharif's use of military terminology in elegizing her uncle reveals how personal loss is inseparable from collective histories of war. Chang's adaptation of the obituary form reveals how private grief is sanitized through public conventions that standardize and obscure death.

While Volosinov helps contextualize how elegiac grief can be both personal and social, Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination reveals the internal tensions within language itself. His concept of "heteroglossia" theorizes how multiple voices, registers, and positions can coexist and compete within a text — which, for Bakhtin, is also precisely how language acquires meaning. Central to heteroglossia is the struggle between what Bakhtin terms "centripetal" and "centrifugal" forces. Centripetal forces pull inward toward standardization and centralized meaning, establishing official norms and expectations (Bakhtin, 271). Institutional forms like military terminology, consumer records, and obituaries exemplify this centripetal tendency, as they impose standardized conventions for documenting war, commerce, and death. Centrifugal forces, conversely, push outward toward diversification and multiplicity. They introduce dialects, jargons, and idiosyncratic expressions that reflect the heterogeneous nature of lived experience (Bakhtin, 272). Bakhtin further distinguishes between "authoritative discourse" and "internally persuasive discourse" (Bakhtin, 342). Authoritative discourse presents itself as already established and beyond dialogue or engagement. Bureaucratic language, for example, typically functions as authoritative discourse, presenting itself as objective and neutral. By contrast, internally persuasive discourse invites engagement, reinterpretation, and dialogue.

When Vuong, Sharif, and Chang appropriate institutional forms, they transform what was designed to be authoritative, centripetal discourse into something internally persuasive and centrifugal. This transformation is significant because, by maintaining the formal features of institutional discourse, these poets speak simultaneously in the voice of power and in the voice of resistance. This strategy embodies what Bakhtin identifies as central to heteroglossia, where centripetal forces of standardization clash with centrifugal forces of diversification, creating productive tension within the text itself. Yet, in The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin also argues that "poetry is premised on the idea of a single unitary language" that "destroys heteroglossia" and "strips the word of the intentions of others" (Bakhtin, 297-298). The work of Vuong, Sharif, and Chang challenges this characterization. While Bakhtin claims that in poetry, language must "forget its previous life in any other contexts", these poets deliberately maintain the heteroglossic nature of institutional language within their poems (Bakhtin, 297). They do not strip military terminology, consumer records, or obituary conventions of their contexts but rather exploit the tension between these contexts and their new poetic functions.

This engagement with institutional records necessarily places these poets in conversation with the archive. The archive, in its simplest sense, is a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people. But beyond this basic definition, the archive is a system of power, determining what gets preserved, how it gets preserved, and who has access to this preservation. As Jacque Derrida writes in Archive Fever: "there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation" (Derrida, 11). For Derrida, to exercise archival power is not just to collect records, but to shape their narrative, and make them meaningful. A relevant example of this is the documentation of warfare through terminology that abstracts and sanitizes violence. These frameworks justify military action and obscure its human consequences, allowing war-makers to control not just how conflict is conducted but how it is remembered and understood.

Derrida further argues that archival authority manifests through what he terms "consignation", which is the "gathering together of signs" into a "system or synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration" (Derrida, 3). This is the process of collecting and organizing diverse materials into systems with unified meaning. This process imposes order, creates relationships between items, and establishes an official interpretation. By doing so, it also shapes how information can be understood. In evaluating Vuong, Chang, and Sharif's works, it is particularly significant to consider how the archive has historically marginalized certain communities. In her work Along the Archival Grain, Ann Laura Stoler argues that the archive establishes what is known through practices that "render some things visible and others not" (Stoler, 50). Specifically, Stoler notes that its form is encoded by ideological, often colonial, assumptions about who and what matters (Stoler, 32).

Stoler's argument becomes particularly relevant when examining the appropriated forms in Vuong, Sharif, and Chang's works. Each poet repurposes institutional documents that typically exclude certain narratives. Most obviously, Amazon purchase histories aren't even intended to be a form of personal expression, but a purely functional record of consumer transactions. Military terminology creates a classificatory system that determines what aspects of war are documentable. Newspaper obituaries impose formal and contextual constraints to standardize grief. Yet, by using these forms to express what they typically exclude, Vuong, Sharif, and Chang engage with what Stoler identifies as the archival's paradoxical nature: it always contains traces of what it attempts to exclude (Stoler, 141). This is what Stoler terms an "epistemic murk" — zones where official documentation preserves evidence of what it tried to erase (Stoler, 141).

While these poets do unearth the emotions hidden in institutional language, it is equally important to note that they engage in another form of resistance: opacity. Their works don't simply expose what archival forms suppress: they also choose to protect certain experiences from full interpretive access. In Infidel Poetics, Daniel Tiffany offers a framework for understanding how such obscurity might function. Rather than viewing it as a barrier to understanding, Tiffany connects poetic obscurity to "underground forms of speech", vernacular languages that operate through selective access. He argues that this illegibility generates poetry's social power: both the familiar and unfamiliar reader participate in the "secret code", one through recognition and the other through encountering the "infidel tongue" (Tiffany, 5). This leads to a broader reconceptualization of how poetry operates: Tiffany proposes that we can "[set] aside the question of meaning", approaching "lyric obscurity (...) as a way of doing things with words" (Tiffany, 8). While I agree with Tiffany's conceptualization of obscurity as socially productive, I find that his argument rests on two problematic assumptions about how "infidel" texts operate. First, it presumes that such texts can be readily identified by its deviation from dominant discourse. Second, by equating obscurity with the "underground", it suggests that opacity emerges from cultural difference rather than through deliberate formal choice. Though Tiffany does acknowledge that poetic obscurity is a matter of reception, his framework still defines it as something encountered by the privileged reader, rather than strategically deployed.

In Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant shifts from poetic obscurity to poetic opacity, asserting: "I demand the right to opacity, which is not confinement" (Glissant, 91). Writing from Martinique's history of French colonization, Glissant identifies how imperial powers have weaponized demands for transparency against colonized peoples. In defining this "right to opacity", Glissant clarifies that "it is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and accepted as such" (Glissant, 191). Instead, this opacity functions as both an aesthetic choice and a political act; both a fundamental right and a fundamental refusal to be rendered completely. Within this framework, poetic obscurity is not merely subjected upon the text by the reader, but emerges as an intentional form of resistance, protecting what cannot, and should not, be fully understood. This distinction is crucial for understanding how these poets operate. Through Stoler and Glissant's frameworks, these works can be read as a response to the double bind of minority expression: the simultaneous pressure to make experiences transparent (and thus consumable) and the historical erasure of those same experiences from formal records.

Throughout the subsequent sections, my close readings will be guided by several key questions. First, following Volosinov's understanding of language as fundamentally dialogic, I will examine how these poets' expressions of grief reveal the inherently social nature of mourning in a world mediated by bureaucratic systems. Second, I will consider how these poets exploit the tension between what Bakhtin calls "authoritative discourse" and "internally persuasive discourse". Third, drawing on Derrida and Stoler's theories of the archive, I will investigate how these poets expose and exploit the "epistemic murk", inadvertently preserving the very experiences it attempts to exclude. Finally, guided by Glissant's concept of opacity as a political right, I will attend to the strategic illegibility in these poets' work by focusing my analysis on the formal and concrete. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate how contemporary poetry responds to a world where institutional records increasingly mediate our experiences of loss, and commercial language seems to drain sentiment from public discourse.

iii. Ocean Vuong’s Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker

In Dear Rose, Ocean Vuong writes: "Mom // are you reading this dear // reader are you my mom // is she in language I cannot // find her without you" (Vuong, 102). Appearing at the crux of the poem that Vuong calls "the spine" of his collection, this stanza captures Time is a Mother's central negotiation: an attempt to locate a lost one in language. As Kadish Morris observes in a book review: "[Time is a Mother] approaches death like an entrance rather than an ending" (Morris). Vuong's elegies are generative: absence creates new forms of presence, and loss generates new modes of understanding. This is seen in the aforementioned quote: "reader are you my mom (...) I cannot find her without you" (Vuong, 102). By conflating the reader with his mother, Vuong generates new ways of "speaking" to her, even if that speech is rooted in fiction. Or, as he writes later in the same poem: "I could // not speak so I wrote myself into // silence where I stood waiting for you mom // to read me" (Vuong, 104).

This potential of language reaches its fullest expression in "Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker" (AHFSW), which reconstructs his mother's battle with cancer in the format of an Amazon purchase history list. Within this form, his mother's illness is documented without any explicit imagery or description. Instead, Vuong's chronology of purchases is used to imply what is never directly said. For example, the opening stanzas of the poem features nail salon supplies (Sally Hansen Pink Nail Polish, 6 pack) alongside pain relievers (Advil (ibuprofen), 4 pack), establishing his mother's profession and its physical toll. As the poem progresses, purchases like "Healthline Compact Trigger Release Folding Walker" signals a decline in health, while purchases like "Chemo-Glam cotton head scarf" confirms the diagnosis.

By repurposing Amazon's purchase history, Vuong firstly reveals how contemporary grief is inevitably mediated by corporate systems. Amazon represents the cornerstone of modern consumer culture, a marketplace where virtually any product can be purchased with minimal interaction. In this landscape, even death and mourning, despite their intensely personal nature, leave commercial traces that are captured. Yet rather than merely critiquing this commodification of loss, Vuong also demonstrates how these systems can be reclaimed as sites of remembrance. Within the transaction records, Vuong excavates moments of profound tenderness: birthday cards with "Mother and Son effect", a "Warrior Mom" t-shirt, mundane items that attest to his mother's love for him. Similarly, while these records chronicle his mother's illness and death, they also locate her presence in digital traces and material artifacts. Through this poetic intervention, the commercial record becomes a contradictory space where his mother's erasure as a consumer statistic also enables her reemergence as a fully realized subject. AHFSW's affective power is ultimately achieved by this dialectic: between documentation and remembrance, between presence and absence, between bought products and the human experiences they reveal.

iii.i. “Julie is a horse?” Or, labor in the nail salon

In the poetic landscape of AHFSW, the nail salon is more than a place of occupation. It embodies a system of economic exploitation and cultural erasure that structures the entire poem. Vuong signals this with his title (where his mother is identified only by her occupation), and the poem's contents (which is saturated with salon supplies). As such, before examining Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker more closely, I'll first contextualize the nail salon industry and its impact on immigrant workers like Vuong's mother.

In The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and Body in the Beauty Service World, Miliann Kang examines how the nail salon industry has been transformed by immigrant workers, particularly Vietnamese and Korean women. To begin her argument, Kang introduces salon work as an example of "body labor". Building on Arlie Hochschild's concept of "emotional labor" (work that requires workers to suppress feelings to sustain an outward appearance for customers), Kang defines "body labor" as "[attending] to the physical comfort and appearance of the customers, through direct contact with the body and attending to the feelings involved with these practices" (Kang, 20). This form of labor can be especially exerting, requiring nail salon workers to simultaneously manage their clients' physical appearance and emotions while also suppressing their own discomfort. The emotional toll of such work manifests in countless daily interactions where workers must navigate cultural differences, language barriers, and personal boundaries, maintaining a professional demeanor regardless of their feelings. In Vuong's novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, a revealing scene unfolds between a grieving customer and the protagonist's mother, who works as a nail technician. Vuong writes:

This moment epitomizes the dynamic of "body labor". Unlike physical labor that demands only bodily exertion, or emotional labor that requires affective performance, body labor necessitates a synthesis of both: maintaining physical composure while suppressing authentic reactions. Little Dog's mother is only able to reclaim her authentic voice after she is done servicing her customer, and significantly, she does so in Vietnamese rather than English.

The emotional demand of this work is amplified by its physical toll: hunching over for hours, inhaling toxic chemicals, and performing repetitive fine-motor tasks. Kang notes that salon workers regularly report "chronic back and neck pain, eye irritation, and breathing difficulties from exposure to chemicals and poor ventilation" (Kang, 229). These symptoms are only the most immediate manifestations of workplace hazards. The long-term health consequences are far more severe, with studies linking salon chemicals to cancer, reproductive issues, and neurological problems (Nir).

Many Vietnamese and Korean immigrant workers are forced to accept these conditions due to limited alternatives. Their vulnerability is exploited through what Kang identifies as the industry's "racial discount", where Asian salons often offer lower-priced services than other salons (Kang, 142). This is due to an implicit racial hierarchy between different types of salon services. While white-owned salons, for example, tend to offer "pampering" services with an emphasis on luxury, Asian-owned salons tend to provide "routinized" services that emphasize affordability (Kang, 35). Kang notes that when Asian labor becomes associated with discount prices, "these women do not simply receive lower returns on their body labor; the very meanings attached to their bodies lower the value of the labor itself" (Kang, 159).

On the surface level, AHFSW's form epitomizes and perpetuates the nail salon's exploitative labor systems. As a corporation, Amazon represents the pinnacle of American consumer culture: a marketplace where labor and suffering disappear into the exchange of goods for money, and where ethical concerns about production are rendered invisible by the transaction itself. Within this form of documentation, Vuong's mother exists without a name beyond her former occupation, or a personal identity beyond her past purchases. Yet, as much as this system dehumanizes, in AHFSW, the purchase history becomes an epistemic murk — a zone where official documentation inadvertently preserves evidence of the experiences it tried to erase (Stoler) — both evidence of erasure and a site of recovery.

While his mother's pain is never explicitly named, Vuong documents her decline through the progression of pain management products that grow in both therapeutic intensity and frequency as the poem unfolds. Early purchases of basic "Advil (ibuprofen)" (2) give way to "Advil Maximum Strength" (50), while "Salonpas Heat-Activated muscle patch" (20) eventually leads to the necessity of a "Healthline Compact Trigger Release Folding Walker" (54). This evolution creates a narrative of physical deterioration entirely through implication. This construction of meaning aligns with Volosinov's conception of language as fundamentally social, where meaning emerges not from dictionary definitions but from specific material contexts. For example, the shift from topical treatments to mobility aids marks a critical transition where pain management becomes insufficient and must be supplemented with adaptive equipment.

Through this progression, Vuong implicates the nail salon industry in his mother's deteriorating health, revealing how immigrant labor conditions directly contributed to her physical suffering. Specifically, the chronological structure of the purchase history signals interconnectedness of his mother's work and her physical suffering, where tokens of illness and supplies for work are inseparable. The semiotics of the list is particularly powerful in these juxtapositions: placing unexpected items in proximity invites readers to construct meaning from their relationship, creating a visual poetics where the structure of the poem performs its critique.

This pattern is established from the opening lines of the poem, which reads: "Advil (ibuprofen), 4 pack // Sally Hansen Pink Nail Polish, 6 pack" (Vuong, lines 1-2). By using a pain reliever as the poem's first item, Vuong establishes physical pain as the foundation of his mother's existence during her final months. Discomfort was not an interruption but a constant reality that required management before any other activity could begin. This deliberate pairing continues throughout the poem's progression: "Salonpas Heat-Activated muscle patch, 40 count" (20) appears immediately after "Portable Electric Nail Drill" (19), while "Bengay Medicated Cream, 3 pack" (34) follows "PIXNOR Pedicure Double-Sided Callus Remover" (33). The consistent pattern creates a clear cause-and-effect relationship between salon tools and pain remedies, suggesting that each act of labor necessitates its corresponding pain relief.

The juxtaposing product descriptions between these pairs encode a hierarchy of value and visibility. While pain relievers, like Advil, appear only with their chemical name (ibuprofen), beauty products, like nail polish, receive both brand recognition (Sally Hansen) and aesthetic description (pink). This juxtaposition reveals a deeper market hierarchy. Beauty products exist in the realm of desire and choice, worthy of branding and description, and pain relief exists in the realm of necessity, reduced to its functional chemical properties. This distinction mirrors the broader social hierarchies at play, where the aesthetics served by nail salon workers receive cultural recognition and commercial specificity, while the bodily suffering they endure remains generic, unbranded, and largely invisible to consumers who benefit from their labor.

AHFSW's documentation renders Vuong's mother legible by translating her suffering into the only language capitalism recognizes: consumption. Her physical decline, which might otherwise remain invisible, gains visibility only through its economic traces. This represents both the poem's power and its implicit critique. Vuong's poem can only document his mother's pain when she purchases additional units of relief, and can only measure the progression of her suffering through her quantities of consumption. This is because, within the commercial archive, pain and suffering exist only as opportunities for capitalist extraction. The only visible symptoms are those that can be alleviated through purchases, while suffering without a marketable solution effectively disappears from the record. This exemplifies Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, where experiences become obscured behind commodities, converting social relationships into transactions between objects (Marx). The true human condition disappears behind the veil of products, as the market renders invisible all aspects of experience that cannot be bought or sold.

The commodification of suffering reaches its most explicit expression when Vuong introduces products specifically branded for cancer patients. AHFSW documents two purchases of "Chemo-Glam cotton head scarf"—one in "sunrise pink" (57) and another in "flower garden print" (60). The name of these products – "Chemo-Glam" – pairs a treatment known for its debilitating side effects with the aspirational language of glamour. This juxtaposition suggests that even chemotherapy can be reframed through the lens of consumer desirability. In fact, it suggests that participation in these consumer rituals could somehow transform the experience of chemotherapy itself. The product's color specifications ("sunrise pink", "flower garden print") creates this illusion by overlaying hopeful, vibrant imagery onto objects necessitated by bodily deterioration. This is where the phrase "sunrise pink" evokes the image of new beginnings, while "flower garden print" suggests growth and vitality. As Volosinov would recognize, this corporate branding represents another battleground over linguistic meaning, marketers actively reshape language to normalize and commodify suffering.

However, while these purchases could certainly be interpreted as futile gestures against mortality, in my readings of AHFSW, I found them to be gestures of hope. Throughout the poem, images of growth and renewal defy indicators of pain and illness. For example, the Windowsill herb garden appears as the sole purchase during one of the final months. Its designation (windowsill) implies confinement to indoor spaces, yet simultaneously transforms this limitation into a site of cultivation. A pot of tulips was purchased in a month where the only other purchase was painkillers. Since tulips take months to bloom, this purchase reveals a hope to survive until spring. These moments of vitality transform consumption into assertions of humanity, small but significant refusals to be reduced to illness, even as life approaches its conclusion.

iii.ii. Wool Socks, Grey, 1 Pair

To return to Derrida's claim that the archive determines "what gets preserved, how it gets preserved, and who has access to this preservation" – Amazon's purchase history exemplifies a system of documentation where human behaviour is understood through commercial logic. Within this framework, individual experience becomes significant when it generates profitable transactions, and narrative becomes a tool to predict and influence future buying behaviour. By repurposing this bureaucratic archive as elegy, Vuong challenges its process of consignation — the gathering of signs into a unified system with a coherent meaning. Instead of allowing his mother's purchases to signify according to capitalism's organizing principles, Vuong reconfigures them to tell a story of love and loss. As such, AHFSW can be read as not just an appropriation of institutional form, but a reclamation of institutional language itself. By turning the archive back on itself, Vuong performs an act of corporate resistance, converting commercial documentation to preserve what would otherwise be erased: the toil of labor, the pain of sickness, and the strength of maternal love.

In constructing AHFSW, Vuong makes omissions and alterations to the Amazon form, most notably in how each item has quantifiers (e.g. 4 pack, 500 count, size S) but no price. This is a significant departure from commercial logic. In the actual Amazon interface, as well as the wider market, price is the primary metric of value. It is both the organizing principle and a definitive measure of an item's worth, reflecting its perceived quality, determining its accessibility to consumers, and establishing its potential for profit or loss. In omitting price, Vuong performs a dual critique: he rejects capitalism's reduction of value to monetary terms, while also revealing alternative metrics of cost and value. To locate these hidden metrics, Vuong leverages quantifiers as indicators of material circumstances and emotional states.

A particularly poignant example is in the clothing that Vuong's mother purchases, which gets smaller in size as the poem progresses. The text moves from a "Newchic Ochre Summer Dress Floral Print, sz 6" (36) in August, to a "Winter coat, navy blue, x-small" (75) in October of the following year. Alongside the context of the poem's other purchases: medications, mobility aids, and eventually funeral supplies, this reduction of size can be understood as a physical manifestation of her deteriorating health. A similar shift from "White Socks, women's small, 12 pack" (58) to the final purchase of Wool socks, grey, 1 pair" (77) marks a transition from planning for months of use to acknowledging a future measured only in days. This narrative would be rendered invisible if price were the only metric of value. In a marketplace system, price functions as what Marx termed "exchange value": a universal equivalent that overrides all qualitative differences between objects, reducing them to a single quantitative measure (Marx). For example, pain medications and birthday cards might appear as equivalent $7.99 transactions despite their radically different purposes.

Within this documentary logic, moments of tenderness emerge from seemingly mundane purchases, particularly those that reveal their mother-son relationship. Vuong writes: "Jun. (...) // Birthday Card—Son—Pop-up Mother and Son effect" (27), and in the following year "Jun. // Birthday Card—'Son, We Will Always Be Together', Snoopy design" (65). The evolution between these cards documents both a worsening illness and an enduring love. The first card, with its "Pop-up Mother and Son effect", suggests dimensionality and physical presence in their relationship. Here, the pop-up feature literally creates depth and space where mother and son can exist together on the page. In the following year, however, the second card features a "Snoopy design" instead of a graphic depicting either the mother or the son. Unlike the first card's tangible "effect", this second card employs a cartoon character, already an abstraction of reality. This is paired with the message "We will always be together", suggesting a togetherness beyond the physical realm.

Throughout the poem, his mother's role as a mother is the only aspect of her personal identity that is explicitly named. In the first card's description, "Son" is directly connected to "Birthday Card" with a dash, clearly designating him as the recipient. This direct labeling stands in contrast to the rest of the purchases in the poem, which rely on context clues to indicate their intended recipient, underscoring the significance of this relationship. Here, it must also be acknowledged that this labeling simultaneously reveals how commercial systems categorize even intimate relationships into marketing demographics.

However, what transcends this potentially generic sentiment is the purchase of "Nike Elite Basketball Shorts, men's small" (28), which accompanies the first card. As the only branded clothing item in the entire poem, this purchase stands out against the mother's possessions. Throughout AHFSW, her personal items appear without specific, or unknown, brands — for example, "Lipstick, 'Night Out Red'" (21) and "Winter coat, navy blue, x-small" (75) both lack brand designations. The food she purchases further emphasizes this modest lifestyle, all inexpensive, processed options: "Little Debbie Chocolate Zebra Cakes" (22), "Nongshim Ramen Noodle Bowl" (9). In a purchase history dominated by inexpensive necessities, this branded item represents a deliberate luxury reserved specifically for her son. While a cynical reading might suggest that sentiment here is merely articulated through corporate branding, I'd argue that Vuong's poem positions it as evidence of how maternal love manifests within the constraints of capitalism and immigrant labor. The mother's self-denial (generic clothing, minimal nutrition) alongside premium items for her son reveals how our most intimate connections cannot be suppressed by the forces that attempt to.

AHFSW conveys a narrative that even traditional elegiac forms might be unable to express. Vuong allows emotion to emerge from what remains unsaid, or perhaps what cannot be articulated through language at all. This approach is especially powerful because it captures one way that grief manifests in contemporary life: not through grand gestures or articulate expressions, but within the ordinary patterns of everyday existence.

iii.iii. Conclusion: “I won’t speak for your pain”

Within the documentary logic of the Amazon purchase history, the items listed in Vuong's poem are mundane. But when placed into AHFSW's poetic landscape, each purchase transcends its commercial purpose to embody a deeper significance. For example, Nike shorts become testament to maternal sacrifice, a pair of grey wool socks becomes symbolic of mortality, a "Chemo-Glam" headscarf reveals both diagnosis and defiance. The tension between the commercial documentation of these items and their poetic significance exemplifies Stoler's epistemic murk — a space where bureaucratic documentation preserves traces of human experience even as it attempts to standardize it. While Amazon's purchase history aims to normalize consumption as purely transactional, Vuong's writing makes us aware of the way it unavoidably captures fragments of the non-transactional aspects of a consumer's life: the pain, love, hope, and deterioration that exceed commercial categorization but still leaves material traces within it.

This form of documentation is limited. The purchase history is inherently unable to represent human experience beyond the transactional. It can capture pain when it generates purchases, and can only register love through material expression. Yet, this inadequacy is also the poem's greatest strength. In the interview with Time magazine, Vuong recalls speaking for his mother during hospital visits: "I thought, here we are again: I have to speak for your pain. I have to verbalize your humanity. Because it's not a given. Which is the central problem with how we value Asian American women" (Vuong). AHFSW deliberately takes the opposite approach. It never claims to capture or narrate the central figure's pain and experiences. How could it, when its subject had passed away years before its ideation? Instead, Vuong constructs a formal strategy that acknowledges the impossibility of complete representation. The reader is never allowed to bridge the distance between poetic voice and subject experience. But, by allowing his mother's experience to remain partially illegible, Vuong rebels against a sentimental description of suffering, which can itself become another form of consumption when grief is packaged for voyeuristic engagement. Rather, AHFSW requires the reader to actively construct meaning from fragmentary evidence. This participatory reading does not allow readers to simply spectate suffering, but rather forces them to engage in its reconstruction.

Through this dialectical engagement with form, Vuong creates an elegiac mode that neither seeks consolation nor embraces permanent melancholia, but instead transforms mourning into an act of resistance against the very systems that contributed to loss. The poem operates through a series of contradictions: physical absence becomes a form of commercial presence, dehumanizing records reveal intimate emotions, and institutional documentation both erases and preserves personal experience. By inhabiting these formal paradoxes, Vuong turns the archive against itself, finding a means to document what such systems typically neglect. Unlike Ramazani's definition of the contemporary elegy as anti-institutional, this approach suggests that modern mourning must engage with bureaucratic systems rather than retreat from them. In this light, Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker represents not just a personal lament but a political intervention where the act of remembrance becomes inseparable from the critique of systems that render certain lives and deaths invisible.

iv. Solmaz Sharif’s Personal Effects

Where Vuong's elegy intertwines personal grief with immigrant labor, Solmaz Sharif's Personal Effects embodies a loss that is inseparable from political history. The poem revolves around Sharif's uncle, Amoo, who was killed in the Iran-Iraq War shortly before she was born. While it spans more than 30 pages, Personal Effects' central endeavor is simple. As David Baker writes in a review, the poem is, above all, "an attempt to meet a man who is already beyond reach" (Baker). In pursuing this impossible reunion, Sharif assembles fragments of collective memory—descriptions of old photographs, excerpts from news articles, and recollections from friends and family—creating what she calls "an album" (11). Sharif's naming is apt. Throughout Personal Effects, she can only observe, interpret, speculate, from a distance.

These attempts at documentation are met with repeated reminders of inadequacy. "Each photo is an absence", Sharif writes to begin one stanza (Sharif, 235). To begin another: "I write him daily // And so I learn to ignore him" (Sharif, 453-454). In a third, she takes on the voice of bystanders to her writing, proclaiming: "How can she write that? // She doesn't know" (Sharif, 431-432). Indeed, even with all the poetry in the world, even with every article, image, and perspective, Sharif's ultimate objective – to meet someone who has long departed – remains impossible. Throughout Personal Effects, language itself seems to reckon with this incompletable task. It is both the tool of pictorial creation and the method of erasure; both a site of reunion and a reminder of absence; a vehicle of sympathy and a weapon of destruction.

The most poignant example of this is Sharif's repurposing of terminology from The US Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Throughout Personal Effects, as well as the larger collection Look, Sharif weaves military jargon into her verse, seamlessly integrating them into her elegy while maintaining their intrusiveness through capitalization. For example, Sharif writes: "Daily I sit // with the language // they've made // of our language // to NEUTRALIZE // the CAPABILITY of LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMS // like you" (Sharif, 124-130).

In her essay A Poetry of Proximity, Sharif writes "language, like the other democratic things (...) is among the first casualties of war. The maiming and obliteration of language preempts and attempts to excuse the maiming and obliteration of bodies" (Sharif). Sharif disrupts this process of archival consignation — the organizing of signs into coherent institutional narratives (Derrida) — fracturing the coherence of the wartime narrative by returning its terms to the experiences they were created to obscure. This strategy embodies what Bakhtin identifies as the tension between "authoritative discourse" and "internally persuasive discourse". The poem's title exemplifies this dual function. PERSONAL EFFECTS carries both its military meaning (a service member's private belongings), and its poetic meaning (the personal impacts of wartime loss). Or, as she writes later in the same essay "to place a quote from Bush's State of the Union address in a Washington Post article has a different effect than to place the same words in a poem. In part because we expect of poems emotion, compulsion without coercion (...) a poem can change how we hear the most mundane, deceptive texts" (Sharif).

iv.i. Grief is a CLOSED AREA

Before any close reading of Personal Effects, it is important to first contextualize the Iran-Iraq War which claimed Amoo's life, and America's involvement in the conflict. This contextualization is crucial given Sharif's positionality. Born to Iranian parents but raised in the United States, Sharif occupies a space between the two nations. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the United States strategically supported the Iraqi regime while maintaining public neutrality, providing intelligence, economic aid, and backing. This support continued despite knowledge of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians. Throughout the war, America tracked Iraqi and American casualties while overlooking Iranian deaths, which range from the official count of 155,000-183,000 to scholarly estimates exceeding 500,000 (Kurzman). This selective documentation was enabled by institutional language systems like The Department of Defense Dictionary, where terminology is defined to facilitate violence by removing its impact through abstraction (e.g. collateral damage, frontal attack). In official documentation, the use of these terms direct attention toward tactical considerations while deflecting from human suffering.

Sharif's repurposing of The Department of Defense Dictionary to document Amoo's life and death is an act of reclamation. By appropriating the very terminology designed to abstract and erase, Sharif creates a counterarchive that insists on recognizing those forgotten by official accounts. Throughout the poem, military terminology is only used when either describing Amoo or expressing instances of grief—two elements that would be erased or minimized in official military documentation. This pattern reinforces Sharif's poetic strategy: using the language of institutional power to document exactly what such institutions exclude. Sharif writes:

While this passage incorporates military terminology throughout, Sharif simultaneously reveals its inadequacy and reclaims it for poetic expression. In the opening line "You are what is referred to as / a 'CASUALTY'", the phrase "referred to as" signals an external, imposed categorization rather than an inherent identity. The quotation marks around 'CASUALTY' further quarantines the military term from the surrounding text.

This rejection of military designation intensifies through Sharif's repetition of "unclear" directly after CATALYTIC and FRONTAL ATTACK. The military meanings of these terms—FRONTAL ATTACK referring to "an offensive action in which the main effort is directed against the front of the enemy forces" and CATALYTIC referring to a substance that accelerates a chemical reaction without being consumed in the process—becomes grotesquely sanitizing when applied to human death (Joint Chiefs of Staff). This is emphasized by Sharif's use of line breaks, which position "unclear" immediately after each military term.

After these initial designations of death, Sharif creates a tonal shift—"the final time you were addressed"—that momentarily reclaims her uncle from bureaucratic erasure. Compared to the capitalization and visual dominance of the military terminology, this line appears in all lowercase letters. If capitalization functions as a visual indicator of volume, then Sharif creates a quiet moment here, which is further emphasized by the line's isolation in its own stanza. This typographical quieting mirrors the content of the line itself: Amoo's final moments of human recognition. The quietness befits this moment's solemnity and intimacy—by lowering the visual volume, Sharif suggests that human recognition happens not in classification but in softer, more intimate registers. These moments of register are not only undocumented in official military records, but remain unknown even to Amoo's family and friends—Sharif acknowledges it as unclear too. But, while both military terminology and elegiac language resists definitive knowledge, their approaches to uncertainty contrast. Military documentation treats uncertainty as a deficiency to be minimized through classification. Poetic language, however, embraces uncertainty as a generative space for alternative modes of recognition.

The phrase "thou, beloved" exemplifies this. As an adjective, beloved is also a form of classification, but one that signals a categorization through intimate relation rather than institutional utility. Here, the word "thou" amplifies this classification through both its function and historical resonance. As a direct form of address, it creates a first-person connection between speaker and address, contrasting with the third-person designations of military documentation. Its archaism, drawn from older literary texts, further contrasts with the clinical modernity of military terminology. This temporal disjunction suggests that authentic recognition draws on traditions of address that predate and will outlast modern bureaucratic systems. While institutional frameworks may temporarily classify Amoo as CASUALTY, his identity as beloved exists in a linguistic register that transcends warfare's classifications.

After this intimate address, Sharif returns to military terminology, but with a crucial transformation that embodies the poem's central thesis. In these subsequent lines, institutional language becomes a hybrid form capable of expressing personal grief while maintaining its official resonance. For example, by preceding "CATASTROPHIC EVENT" with "it was for us," Sharif recalibrates the term's scope, converting what would typically function as a broad military designation into a specific description of familial grief. Similarly, the addition of "Just" before "DESTROYED" introduces a conversational register to clinical language, creating a vernacular bridge that humanizes the technical term. These subtle linguistic interventions don't strip military terms of their power. They remain intrusive and loud, their capitalization still jarring against the surrounding lowercase text. However, Sharif redirects that power toward articulating what such terminology was designed to obscure.

This hybridization captures the central paradox of Sharif's approach: grief simultaneously exists in multiple registers. These registers span between personal and institutional, private mourning and collective commemoration. However, what remains consistent is that this mourning is something that the reader can never fully access. In her descriptions of grief, Sharif constructs it as a physical, domestic space that actively resists interpretation and entry. She writes: "grief is a CLOSED AREA // CLUTTERed with his fork against the plate // and other forgotten musics" (Sharif, lines 228-230). This designation reveals how Sharif's reclamation of military terminology works not to make grief more institutional, but to preserve its fundamental privacy. The Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms defines CLOSED AREA as a space where "passage of any kind is prohibited" (Joint Chiefs of Staff). This military definition supports the poetic one, that grief remains inaccessible to all except those who have experienced the specific loss.

Within this prohibited space dwells ordinary domestic details—"his fork against the plate and other forgotten musics." The description of these domestic sounds as "musics" transforms household noise into something melodic, suggesting that what might seem like ambient background to others carries beauty and artistry to those who mourn. Indeed, these fragments represent grief's true substance. We don't mourn loved ones by their tactical rank or historical significance, but through the small, ordinary moments that constituted their daily life. Yet by labeling these "musics" as "forgotten," Sharif also acknowledges their fundamental vulnerability. These intimate soundscapes exist primarily in memory, fading with time and impossible to preserve in conventional documentation. This tension between significance and impermanence is exemplified by the military term CLUTTER. The Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms defines CLUTTER as "permanent echoes, cloud, or other atmospheric echo on radar scope" (Joint Chiefs of Staff). The fork against plate becomes both music and radar clutter—simultaneously significant and insignificant, depending on who determines value.

iv.ii. In the House of Love and of Death

Throughout Personal Effects, Sharif juxtaposes two distinct documentary forms—military terminology and war-time memorabilia. While both record conflict, they operate through opposing frameworks. Military language sanitizes violence through clinical distance, obscuring personal losses behind tactical objectives and strategic outcomes. Wartime memorabilia captures war's intimate impact, focusing on individual experience rather than collective strategy. These personal artifacts humanize what official terminology deliberately erases, returning specificity to what military discourse renders generic. Yet Sharif also resists the temptation to present this memorabilia as purely authentic or unmediated. Throughout the poem, these artifacts are revealed to be inherently voyeuristic, transforming lived experience into observable objects, and creating a different kind of distance.

A particularly significant artifact in Personal Effects is the photograph. Sharif not only describes various images of her uncle throughout the poem but also frames the entire work with an epigraph from Susan Sontag's On Photography—"like guns and cars, cameras // are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive" (Sharif, lines 1-2). The comparison of cameras with weapons signals photography as another form of wartime violence: the abstraction of brutality into consumable fantasy. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag elaborates on this parallel, arguing that photographs create an illusion of transparency while performing acts of selection—"to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude" (Sontag, 38). Every photograph inevitably involves choices about what deserves visibility and what remains unseen, which moments merit preservation and which vanish. In producing photography about war, these choices become especially contentious. Such images, regardless of intent, can never achieve true objectivity; they invariably convey specific narratives, reinforcing perspectives while suppressing others. This selection mirrors institutional archives themselves—systems that claim objectivity while fundamentally shaping the very history they purport to preserve.

This is particularly significant when considering the erasure of Middle Eastern experiences in American discourse. As Edward Said argues in Covering Islam, Western media representations position Middle Eastern subjects as either invisible or hypervisible as threats, but rarely permitted to exist on their own terms (Said, 48). This binary of representation creates "a system of representations framed by political forces", reducing complex societies and individuals to simplified abstractions serving Western narrative needs (Said, 63). During the Iran-Iraq War specifically, American media largely portrayed the conflict through geopolitical frameworks rather than humanitarian ones, rendering the experiences of civilians like Sharif's uncle invisible. In Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror, Hamid Dabashi builds on Said's critique by arguing that Western visual representations of Middle Eastern subjects operate through a "visual colonization of the Muslim world" (Dabashi, 112). This visual regime excludes everyday moments of Middle Eastern life (family gatherings, intimate relationships, ordinary joys and sorrows) in favor of images that confirm Western preconceptions (crowds of angry protesters, veiled women, armed militants) (Dabashi, 115). As Dabashi notes, "the quotidian life of Muslims is entirely absent from this visual economy, for it is precisely that quotidian that would humanize them beyond recognition as the categorical 'other'" (Dabashi, 115).

In Personal Effects, the photograph operates in two contradictory ways. On one hand, all of the described images depict military contexts, which fits within the Western media economy that Dabashi critiques, reducing Middle Eastern subjects to their relationship with conflict. However, on the other hand, Sharif's use of language challenges this erasure by surrounding these images with family anecdotes and quotidian memories that the photographs exclude. This linguistic intervention parallels her approach to military terminology; both processes take institutional forms designed for erasure and transform them into vehicles for intimacy. Through this dual reclamation, Sharif demonstrates how elegiac expression can resist institutional frameworks while acknowledging their influence on how we document and remember the dead.

Rather than presenting photographs as objective records, Sharif foregrounds their inherent inadequacies. To begin one section, she writes:

By opening with "what I see", Sharif immediately establishes the photograph not as objective evidence but as a surface that invites subjective interpretation, furthered by qualifying phrases like "I'm not even sure" and "I assume". This phrasing foregrounds the viewer's perceptual experience rather than the photograph's supposed documentary truth, emphasizing that seeing is always an active, interpretive process.

Sharif's uncertainty about even basic elements within the frame—"I'm not even sure they are apples, quince, // pear, some desert potato with a stem"—highlights how photographs fail to provide the contextual information necessary for accurate interpretation. Though Sharif first names the object as "apples", this recognition is immediately destabilized with alternatives: "quince, // pear, some desert potato with a stem." This instability is reinforced by Sharif's syntactical structure. Rather than writing "I'm not sure they're apples, they might be quince," she presents possibilities in rapid succession. This staccato rhythm, intensified through line breaks, mirrors the cognitive process of testing multiple interpretations against ambiguous visual data. Crucially, this testing leads to no resolution—each potential identification only generates further possibilities, culminating in the deliberately vague "some desert potato with a stem." This progression from specific (apples) to increasingly vague designations demonstrates how photographic evidence generates rather than resolves uncertainty.

Most significantly, Sharif shows how photographs fail to capture what exists beyond their boundaries. While the earlier stanzas interpret visible elements within the photograph ("from the number of peels / I assume…"), Sharif later shifts to imagining what exists beyond the frame. The photograph captures a mundane moment—her uncle preparing food, an ordinary activity seemingly disconnected from warfare. Yet Sharif's speculations radically transform this image when she writes: "maybe around you, // today, they fell until / you didn't understand / how you hadn't // been hit". By suggesting violence occurring just outside the camera's view, Sharif reveals that the photograph's authority rests on being an empirical representation of reality, while also concealing the crucial context that makes it truly intelligible.

While photographic documentation is revealed to be inadequate, Sharif's use of poetic language pulls Amoo back into quotidian life. In another section, Sharif writes:

Sharif also immediately reveals this section to be speculative, as signaled by "we hope" and "we will have to guess." However, unlike her interactions with photographs where ambiguity reveals inadequacy, this poetic speculation is generative and restorative. The list poem has a significant formal contrast with the photograph. Where the photograph must capture a single moment from one fixed perspective, inherently excluding all other possibilities, the list form accommodates multiple simultaneous truths. Sharif does not need to narrow down to one "correct" interpretation but can instead present an array of possibilities. This formal choice resists the documentary impulse to establish a singular authoritative account, suggesting instead that Amoo's humanity exists precisely in the multiplicity of what might have moved him.

Sharif's choice to focus specifically on what "moved" her uncle further emphasizes this resistance to institutional documentation. While military records would document Amoo's rank and deployment, photographs capture his appearance, and official histories might note his combat role, these factual records preserve only the tangible and institutional. By speculating instead about what "moved" him, Sharif privileges what Dabashi identifies as excluded from Western representations: the sensibilities that humanize rather than categorize. This focus on interiority creates a fundamentally different archival approach, acknowledging documentary impossibility while insisting on the significance of what remains unrecorded.

These mundane inspirations are grounded in concrete sensory details, rather than abstract emotions. For example, Sharif does not write "the person that he loved", but instead "shampoo in her wet hair" and "the arms of someone who smells nice to him in the morning". Here, Sharif alludes to particular moments or routines, rather than generic human experiences. The reference to "shampoo in her wet hair" evokes scent, texture, and the intimacy of witnessing someone in a vulnerable moment. "The arms of someone who smells nice to him in the morning" suggests not just a lover but the temporality of waking up beside someone in a shared space. Similarly, Sharif does not write "sangak", but "sangak fresh from the oven dampening the newspaper on the walk home from the baker's". Beyond just describing the bread (fresh from the oven), Sharif also captures the dampening newspaper used to carry it and the precise setting where this experience unfolds (walking home from the baker's). These details all resist abstraction, insisting on Amoo's life as composed of distinctive, embodied experiences rather than universal categories.

iv.iii. Conclusion: “Yes, how could I not?”

To end Personal Effects, Solmaz Sharif imagines meeting the uncle that she'll never meet, who was killed shortly before she was born: "You stoop, extend a hand // Hello. Do you know who I am? // Yes, I tell you, I half-lie (...) // Yes, Amoo. // How could I not?" (Sharif, lines 527-534). This imagined encounter captures Sharif's poetic negotiation in Personal Effects: to meet across boundaries that appear insurmountable. These reckonings are, in many ways, impossible. Additional modes of documentation can still never fully recover what has been erased—the countless losses obscured under the guise of tactical warfare. Despite the reclamation of military terminology, the battle over language still persists. And of course, Sharif's reunion with Amoo can exist only in fiction.

It is in poetry where these impossible reconciliations find potential expression. As Sharif writes in A Poetry of Proximity: "placing different languages in proximity removes them from their prescribed roles, jostling them into new possibilities. And (...) the poets, their role, the caretaking of language, is to keep it from calcifying" (Sharif). When language "calcifies", it becomes fixed in meaning and function—military terminology ossifies into pure abstraction, while elegiac language risks becoming ritualized sentiment. This hardening serves institutional power by stabilizing meanings and restricting possibilities for reinterpretation. Sharif's poetic "jostling" of language prevents both institutional and elegiac language from hardening into convention. By forcing these disparate linguistic registers into unexpected proximity, Sharif creates productive tension that revitalizes both modes of expression while revealing their inherent limitations and possibilities.

This approach exemplifies what Bakhtin argues is the heteroglossic nature of language, where a single text inherently contains multiple competing voices and meanings rather than singular, authoritative definitions. For example, in Personal Effects, the battle over language simultaneously signifies institutional power and intimate grief. This documentation ranges from limiting and photographic to expansive and imaginative through the same vocabulary; and the impossible reunion exists as both acknowledged fiction ("half-lie") and emotional truth ("How could I not?"). This heteroglossic tension is significant because it challenges the fundamental premise of institutional language—that meaning can be standardized within authorized frameworks. While Derrida argues that political powers control archival frameworks (like The Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms), Sharif demonstrates that institutional authority is not required to shape remembrance or documentation. Language, though regulated by systems of power, can never be fully colonized. It contains within itself the seeds of its own reclamation.

The multiplicity of Sharif's language is significant to elegiac theory. Personal Effects transcends the binary that Sacks and Ramazani establish between consolation and melancholia. It is politically inconsolable in its confrontation with systematic erasure, yet momentarily resolved in the poem's final imagined encounter. Where Ramazani argues that the nature of modern loss renders consolation impossible, Sharif offers a more hopeful alternative. Rather than resigning to perpetual melancholia as the only authentic response to contemporary loss, her work creates conditional spaces where what remains impossible becomes momentarily achievable through poetic transformation. Poetry becomes neither a site of false comfort nor unending despair, but rather a third space where contradictions can productively coexist: where documentation meets imagination, where absence meets presence, where institutional language meets intimate expression. Her ending acknowledgment —"Yes, Amoo. How could I not?"— perfectly encapsulates this dialectic feat. It is both intimate recognition and its impossibility, both complete certainty and unmitigable doubt.

v. Victoria Chang’s Obit

There are more than sixty obituaries in Victoria Chang's Obit, but only one for the death that inspired the collection: "My Mother—died unpeacefully on August 3, 2015 in her room at Walnut Village Assisted Living in Anaheim, California of pulmonary fibrosis" (Chang, 6). As the book jacket explains, Chang initially refused to write for her mother's death, finding elegies too "cliché". However, after watching a documentary of the same name, Chang grew interested in the obituary, or more specifically, in the word "obit". While elegy has soft, lingering syllables, Chang was drawn to the stark phonetics of obit. She explains: "I thought [it] was really beautiful (...) when you say the O, your mouth stays open and (...) there's that finality of the T, which almost feels like a door shutting, like death" (Chang). The distinction between these terms is significant, extending beyond phonetics into their approaches to mourning. While the elegy eulogizes, commemorates, and maybe even deifies its subject, Chang's collection places no spotlight on its founding loss. Instead, it focuses on the deaths of the everyday – faculties (language, memory), abstract concepts (the future, similes), and tangible objects (bees, clothes) that loss might typically go unnoticed in grief.

This approach is as much 'anti-obituary' as it is 'anti-elegy'. The institutional obituary functions as a public ritual, written for a broader community and aiming to provide closure. Through formulaic narratives that transform mortality into recognizable social scripts ("passed peacefully," "surrounded by loved ones"), these texts make death more public and less real. Chang's work, on the other hand, refuses the narrative of the obituary. Her obits catalog what is absent or unresolved: the failures, breakages, and ruptures of loss. As such, they inhabit the very spaces that conventional memorialization bypasses. The messy, contradictory, and often ungrievable aspects of mortality. Or, as Heidi Seaborn writes for the Adroit Journal: "these poems are wounds, not buried bodies" (Seaborn).

From these observations, one might classify Chang's Obits as exemplifying Ramazani's definition of the modern elegy as melancholic. This interpretation has some merit. Ramazani contends that modern life renders consolation impossible, and throughout Obit, Chang's personal losses constantly intertwine with broader societal losses. For example, in her final obit, Chang writes of the day of the Parkland shooting: "America—died on February 14, 2018, and my dead mother doesn't know" (Chang, 104). By juxtaposing national trauma with her mother's absence, Chang collapses the boundaries between public and private grief. This conjunction creates a double absence: her mother is gone and thus cannot witness America's decline, while America itself has lost its capacity to properly mourn either individual or collective tragedies.

Yet to claim that Chang's work is "perpetually melancholic" also oversimplifies her engagement with loss. Her refusal to commemorate through conventional forms doesn't reject mourning but rather acknowledges that nothing and no one can be mourned in isolation—as she states on Obit's book jacket: "when someone you love dies, everything dies" (Chang). This serves a dual purpose: it confronts painful realities while simultaneously opening space for a more authentic hope. Scattered throughout Obit are a dozen pages of tanka, a five-line Japanese verse form. While Chang's obits look back at her parents, her tanka face the generations after her, titled "My children, children". By shedding the obituary's rigid structure for more fluid forms, and by turning her gaze from past loss to future generations, Chang suggests that by acknowledging the ruptures loss creates, we might develop a more sustainable relationship with grief, one that neither denies suffering nor remains defined by it. Or, as she ends the collection by writing: "I am trying to // end this poem with hope hope hope".

v.i. My Father’s Frontal Lobe

Chang's opening obit announces not her father's death but the death of "[Her] Father's Frontal Lobe" (Chang, 5). This distinction is crucial. While the frontal lobe and Chang's father share the same birth date, they die different deaths. The frontal lobe died of a stroke in 2009, but Chang's father continues living on, though no longer the same as he was before. While conventional obituaries require a complete subject—a person whose life can be summarized, whose death can be dated, and whose legacy can be assessed, Chang recognizes that loss often occurs in fragments. Though her father's stroke inspires nearly half of the collection's obits, Chang never writes an elegy for him, and instead documents the secondary losses that radiate from his condition. This fragmentation challenges what institutional obituaries attempt to impose: a system of classification that renders death legible.

By making death "manageable," the obituary form also serves to contain grief within acceptable boundaries—both temporal (grief should progress toward resolution) and expressive (grief should be dignified rather than excessive). This containment functions as a form of social regulation, preventing the potentially destabilizing effects of unprocessed loss on productive society. The stakes of such legibility extend far beyond documentation. It maintains the appearance of order amid chaos, reinforces cultural hierarchies about whose deaths merit commemoration, and prescribes acceptable emotional responses to loss. This regulation becomes particularly evident in public tragedies like the Parkland shooting, where media narratives quickly transform individual deaths into collective symbols, often bypassing the messy particulars of actual grief in favor of broader political messaging.

When Chang fragments her subject rather than presenting a complete person, she actively resists the regulatory functions of conventional obituaries, creating space for grief that institutional language typically excludes. This resistance manifests clearly in her treatment of her father's stroke. Rather than declaring a definitive death (as traditional obituaries demand), Chang presents loss as a complex process that defies containment. Through this approach, she reveals the fundamental inadequacy of the obituary in accurately representing loss. Chang writes:

Chang's opening lines both mimic and subvert the conventional obituary form, revealing how institutional language sanitizes death through standardized expressions. She begins with the standardized information often found in newspaper obituaries: precise time and place of death ("June 24, 2009 at Scripps Memorial Hospital in San Diego, California"), date of birth ("January 20, 1940"), and formulaic character assessments ("the frontal lobe enjoyed a good life" and "loved being the boss"). In traditional obituaries, these components transform the reality of death into recognizable social scripts: the precise dates create temporal boundaries that quantify a life within definable parameters, while the formulaic praise offers sanitized representations that obscure complexity.

Through strategic misapplication, Chang exposes the fundamental inadequacy of this institutional language. When she writes "the frontal lobe enjoyed a good life" and "loved being the boss," she applies obituary conventions to a brain region rather than a person, revealing the emptiness of such language. Conventional obituaries rely on generic character summaries that reduce individuals to sanitized social roles and virtues, while creating the illusion of personalization. By applying these same formulations to a brain region, Chang strips them of their pretense to meaning, revealing how such language serves to render death palatable through familiar scripts. The frontal lobe's supposed enjoyment of "a good life" and love of "being the boss" is darkly comic because such phrases could apply to anyone, or in this case, anything.

This critique of sanitization extends beyond content to the very language of mortality itself. Chang describes the frontal lobe's death as "unpeaceful"—directly rejecting the phrase "passed peacefully" that conventional obituaries employ to minimize death's violence and discomfort. This deliberate negation establishes a pattern throughout her first four obituaries, where she selects terms—unpeaceful, unwilling, unknowing—that emphasize rather than obscure mortality's disturbing reality.

In the latter lines of the obit, Chang escalates to vivid imagery that shatters obituary conventions entirely: "It tried to talk again but someone put a bag over it. When the frontal lobe died it sucked in its lips like a window pulled shut". While conventional obituaries employ euphemistic language and standardized narratives to render death palatable, Chang deliberately introduces elements that expose mortality's disturbing, visceral reality. This transition from formulaic language to graphic depiction creates multiple ruptures in institutional representation. Firstly, Chang disrupts the obituary's distancing techniques by shifting from past tense summary to immediate, present-action. Where traditional obituaries maintain emotional distance through retrospective generalizations, Chang's scene forces confrontation with death as it happens. This shift from sanitized summary to immediate witness undermines the obituary's function of containing death within comfortable narrative frameworks.

Secondly, she subverts the neat, orderly progression that obituaries impose by introducing messiness and contradiction. By giving the supposedly deceased frontal lobe continued agency—it "tried to talk again"—and depicting violence through "someone put a bag over it," Chang rejects institutional language that presents death as a clean, passive finality. Conventional obituaries sanitize mortality by transforming even painful deaths into peaceful transitions. Chang's portrayal of struggle, resistance, and silencing exposes the fundamental messiness of death that institutional forms systematically exclude.

Conventional obituaries depend on stable linguistic frameworks to transform death into ordered narratives. Similarly, elegies rely on language's permanence, using metaphor, apostrophe, and lyrical expression to preserve what has been lost. Chang, however, reveals a fundamental paradox by making Language itself a subject of mortality throughout Obit. Not only does she dedicate three obituaries explicitly to language, but she also memorializes related elements—similes, form, memory—and positions several poems at the "funeral for words". This attention to language's vulnerability creates a tension at the core of her project: the tool required for commemoration proves itself inadequate when needed most. Yet despite acknowledging this limitation, Chang simultaneously mourns language's failures while acknowledging its necessity. In one obit, she conflates language with her father:

Chang confronts conventional memorialization by conflating language with her pre-stroke father. Throughout this obit, she assigns masculine pronouns to language ("his favorite") and attributes human behaviors to it ("lover of raising his hand"). Where conventional obituaries separate individuals from their qualities—cataloging traits, relationships, and accomplishments as discrete elements within established frameworks—Chang fuses her father with his linguistic practices. This fusion reveals that identity and expression are inseparable; her father didn't merely "use" language but partially existed through it. When stroke damages these capacities, what results is not a definitive death that can be precisely dated, but a fragmentation where aspects of personhood dissolve while others persist. This messy partial presence defies the obituary's sanitizing function, which depends on clear distinctions between life and death.

While conventional obituaries typically emphasize virtues while omitting complications, Chang acknowledges both the good and the bad in her portrait of language-as-father: the language-father both "loved raising his hand" (suggesting eager participation and engagement) and "twisting what others said" (suggesting manipulation or distortion). He both "lived a full life of questioning" (suggesting ample curiosity) and "wrote the world in black and white" while watching others "try and read the words in color" (suggesting a lack of engagement with non-binary perspectives). Rather than presenting these tensions as flaws to be minimized, Chang positions them as essential components of an identity. This approach offers a more realistic portrayal of our loved ones; we cherish them not despite their complications but often because of them, their idiosyncrasies and contradictions forming an integral part of who they are.

Chang's description of language as "brilliant and beautiful"—a positive characterization that contrasts with the clinical descriptions she uses for other faculties—demonstrates that language's power lies in its ability to embody complexity and ambiguity. Here, "brilliant" captures both intellectual acuity and luminosity, suggesting language's capacity to illuminate experience even as it occasionally misleads. "Beautiful" evokes an emotional and aesthetic response that exceeds pure utility, acknowledging language's ability to move us. Together, these descriptors celebrate the language-father's capacity to both clarify and confuse, to both illuminate and obscure, mirroring language's own dual nature as both a tool for precise communication and a medium susceptible to distortion.

v.ii. #Americadies

Throughout Obit, Chang places grief against the backdrop of public violence, particularly America's endemic gun violence. For example, in an obit for her own death, Chang writes: "the police came and shined their lights onto the field, started shooting the letters even though they had their hands up. Sometimes, they shot the letters twice, just to make sure. Sometimes, they shot them in the back" (Chang, 8). Language, which begins as a commemoration of her father's diminishing cognitive abilities, becomes something more expansive and politically charged. Chang personifies the letters that once formed her father's thoughts as victims of state violence, likely evoking the police shootings of unarmed Black Americans. The raised hands reference Michael Brown's reported "hands up" gesture before being killed by police in Ferguson, while the shots "in the back" mirror Walter Scott's murder in North Charleston.

If the obituary functions as a form that sanitizes death through standardized forms and euphemistic language, media coverage of violence operates as its counterpart. Both systems process mortality in ways that maintain social order rather than disrupting it. As communications scholar Barbie Zelizer argues in About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, media coverage of violent death follows established conventions designed to maintain a distance between viewers and mortality (Zelizer, 11). This sanitization becomes particularly pronounced in deaths that evolve into public tragedies, such as police shootings like Walter Scott's murder. Media coverage transforms individual deaths into cultural narratives through predictable patterns: initial shock gives way to casualty counts, followed by biographical sketches that reduce victims to symbolic representatives. Coverage then pivots away from individual victims to broader policy debates, where violence becomes abstracted into political discussions. The cycle concludes with narratives of healing, resilience, and moving forward—imposing artificial closure that rarely reflects survivors' ongoing trauma. This standardized coverage pattern ultimately establishes emotional distance between audiences and lived reality. By converting deeply personal tragedies into consumable content, media sanitization allows for brief engagement before public attention inevitably moves elsewhere.

Where media sanitization maintains artificial boundaries between private and public loss, Chang's work deliberately collapses these distinctions. By integrating systemic violence into her intimate grief, she suggests that such tragedies cannot be neatly compartmentalized or resolved. They fundamentally alter how we experience both personal and collective mourning. This culminates in the collection's final obituary, dated February 14, 2018, and addressed to America. This date marks the Parkland school shooting in Florida, where seventeen students and staff members were killed and seventeen others wounded. By introducing her dead mother into this obituary for America, Chang challenges conventional memorialization, which typically positions mass shootings as public events requiring political response while treating family deaths as private matters for personal grief. She writes:

Chang's declaration of America's death, rather than the deaths of specific individuals, confronts the media's tendency to compartmentalize violence. By elevating a school shooting to national mortality, she rejects the framework that these tragedies affect only particular communities. Instead, Chang insists that they implicate our entire social fabric. This refusal of sanitized boundaries is further amplified by the phrase "my dead mother doesn't know," which suggests that this national death should concern even those who are themselves deceased.

Where media coverage and obituaries present death as a discrete event, Chang insists on its fragmentary nature, describing America's death as "a series of small deaths, each one less precise than the next". Here, the phrase "less precise than the next" suggests a deterioration of meaning that defies media's tendency to impose increasingly refined narratives on tragedy. Chang accomplishes this resistance through linguistic destabilization. Where institutional frameworks strive for greater clarity with each iteration of a narrative, Chang's deaths become progressively more ambiguous. This inversion disrupts the mechanisms through which media coverage typically functions.

This pattern of fragmentation extends throughout the collection. Just as her father's cognitive decline manifests through the deaths of various faculties (language, logic, memory), America experiences not one definitive end but multiple partial deaths. This parallel reveals not only how memorialization sanitizes both personal and public loss through identical mechanisms, but also the fundamental interconnectedness of private and collective grief. Chang suggests that these seemingly separate domains of mourning actually operate through shared emotional and linguistic processes. This interconnection is furthered by her placing her mother's death as a temporal marker that precedes the nation's decline. By establishing this sequence, Chang suggests that private grief fundamentally alters how one perceives subsequent public tragedies. This challenges the compartmentalization of the media by demanding a different engagement, one where witnessing a public tragedy is inseparable from our most intimate experiences of loss.

The interconnectedness between private and public tragedy reaches its fullest expression when Chang writes, "My dead mother asks each of these children if they know me, have seen me, how tall my children are now". By creating a dialogue between her mother and the Parkland victims, Chang challenges the sanitizing tendency to process personal grief and public tragedy through separate frameworks. The progression of her mother's questions follows a pattern of escalating intimacies: from recognition ("if they know me"), to visual encounter ("have seen me"), to specific knowledge of family developments ("how tall my children are now"). This graduated sequence mirrors how relationships deepen in life, beginning with general awareness and progressing toward more personal knowledge. Significantly, these questions all center on Chang rather than on her mother or the Parkland victims, creating a triangular relationship where the dead connect through their shared relationship to the living. By having her mother inquire about her to these children, Chang suggests that personal connection transcends these artificial categories, creating unexpected kinships between seemingly unrelated losses.

This reimagining ultimately offers an unexpectedly hopeful vision: while institutional sanitization isolates us in our separate griefs, authentic engagement with mortality reveals the profound connections that link individual suffering to collective experience, creating possibilities for community even in devastation. This vision reaches its fullest expression in Chang's declaration: "I used to think death was a kind of anesthesia. Now I imagine long lines, my mother taking in all the children." This statement juxtaposes two fundamentally different conceptions of death, the first aligning with sanitization and the second challenging it. Just as medical anesthesia deliberately suspends consciousness to facilitate institutional procedures, obituaries and media coverage impose standardized language that deadens grief's psychological impact. This understanding treats death as fundamentally static and contained, a neutral absence rather than an active presence.

Chang's revised vision—"Now I imagine long lines, my mother taking in all the children"—reimagines death as an active process of connection and development. The metaphor of "long lines" suggests forward movement, anticipation, and organized progression toward something yet to unfold. The act of "taking in all the children" imagines Chang's mother in an expanded maternal role, becoming a surrogate parent to victims she never met in life. Significantly, Chang refers to her mother here simply as "my mother" rather than "my dead mother" (the designation used consistently throughout earlier portions of the obituary), suggesting that motherhood transcends the boundary between living and dead, creating continuity where institutional language imposes rupture.

This new conception of death offers hopeful implications for the living, particularly in how we engage with loss. While institutional sanitization isolates us in our separate griefs, Chang's approach dissolves the boundaries between personal and public mourning, suggesting that our most intimate losses might actually prepare us to engage more authentically with collective trauma. Rather than containing grief within frameworks that isolate us, we can step into roles of care for one another, creating communities of mourning that extend beyond conventional social ties. For private grief, this transformation is equally profound. Chang's collection begins with the fragmentary losses of her father's cognitive abilities and culminates in a mother who continues to forge relationships beyond death itself. This trajectory suggests that personal loss need not remain confined to individual experience but can become the foundation for wider ethical engagement. The deaths that permeate Obit—from language to America itself—reveal how mortality links us through shared vulnerability.

Through this engagement with loss, Chang offers a more honest framework for mourning—one that doesn't promise resolution or comfort, but rather reveals how grief fundamentally reshapes our understanding of what it means to be human in a world where everything and everyone is connected through the certainty of mortality. This isn't mere sentiment but a radical reimagining of how we might live with and through loss.

v.iii. Conclusion: “My children, children”

In Obit's last tanka, Chang writes "I am ready to / admit I love my children. / To admit this is / to admit that they will die" (Chang, 105). Throughout Obit, everything dies. From abstract concepts to everyday objects to aspects of the self, Chang insists that one loss always ripples outward to affect countless others. Yet amid this landscape of universal mortality, Chang deliberately withholds death from her children. Unlike everything else in the collection, they never appear in the obituary columns, never receive their own elegy. Even in the tankas, Chang only addresses them directly, speaking to rather than about them—preserving them as listeners rather than subjects of mourning.

Throughout the collection, Chang grapples with the paradox of parenting after losing a parent. She repeatedly confronts the chain of mortality: if her parents can die, then Chang can die, then her children will die. In a poetic landscape where everything and everyone is either mourned or mourning, these realizations are both terrifying and inevitable. Yet while her children's presence embodies the collection's deepest fear, they simultaneously represent its most profound hope. Yes, everything and everyone dies, but rather than death being antithetical to life, Chang reveals it as integral to it. This emerges in the final tanka, where she acknowledges that truly loving her children means accepting their mortality.

This conceptualization transforms how we understand death itself. Rather than treating mortality as a failure to be overcome or an absence to be filled—as traditional elegies often do—Chang positions it as a necessary condition for meaning. Death in her work is simultaneously all-consuming, stark, harsh, and final, yet also the fundamental connection that binds humanity together. By acknowledging rather than sanitizing this duality, Chang creates a more honest and ultimately more hopeful framework for engaging with loss.

This approach charts a path beyond established elegiac traditions. Where traditional elegies transform the deceased into transcendent figures, Chang refuses spiritual compensation: her father's frontal lobe doesn't ascend to heavenly realms but dies partially and repeatedly. Similarly, her mother doesn't achieve peaceful rest but continues engaging with history from beyond the grave. Chang equally rejects the modern elegiac refusal of any resolution, and instead moves toward a hope that emerges precisely through acknowledging rather than resolving loss. This distinctive approach is captured in her collection's final lines: "this poem will not end because // I am trying to // end this poem with hope hope hope, // see how the mouth stays open?" (Chang, 105). The open mouth signals neither compensatory closure nor perpetual wounding but a third possibility—continuing to speak from within grief rather than either transcending or being consumed by it.

vi. Conclusion: Poetic Disobediences

Throughout this thesis, I have examined how Ocean Vuong, Solmaz Sharif, and Victoria Chang harness institutional forms—Amazon purchase histories, military terminology, and obituaries—to articulate what such systems typically erase: the full dimensions of grief. Far from constraining emotional depth, these formal appropriations create new possibilities for mourning that move between personal and collective experience. What emerges from this analysis is a fundamental reconceptualization of elegiac expression. Where traditional elegies seek consolation through aesthetic substitution (as Sacks argues) and modern elegies embrace melancholia by refusing closure (as Ramazani suggests), these poets chart a third path. They create elegiac works that neither seek comfort nor remain trapped in unresolved grief, but instead transform institutional language itself into a dialectical space where absence and presence, documentation and erasure, public and private can productively coexist.

This approach is not merely stylistic but deeply consequential. In the introduction, I positioned these poets' work within a broader negotiation with death and institutional erasure that many Asian American writers share. My analysis confirms this insight, revealing how these poets' appropriation of institutional forms does not simply eulogize loss but engages with larger histories of displacement, violence, and erasure. Moreover, by repurposing bureaucratic forms, these poets locate within them the very experiences they were designed to erase. For example, when Vuong documents his mother's cancer progression through Amazon orders, he reveals how illness, immigrant labor, and death leave commercial footprints even as capitalism renders the human stories invisible. Similarly, when Sharif writes "you are what is referred to as / a 'CASUALTY,'" she exposes how military terminology classifies her uncle's death while erasing his humanity. Yet she reclaims this language by immediately countering with "the final time you were addressed // thou, beloved". Chang performs a comparable transformation when she writes "America—died on February 14, 2018, and my dead mother doesn't know", collapsing the boundary between public tragedy (the Parkland shooting) and private grief (her mother's death).

Some critics might argue that by adopting institutional forms, these poets risk legitimizing the systems they seek to critique. From this perspective, poetic intervention would require rejecting institutional forms entirely—much like Ramazani's conception of the elegy. However, this critique misunderstands both the nature of contemporary grief and the strategies these poets employ. In a world where our lived experiences are increasingly mediated by bureaucratic systems, rejection of institutional language becomes not just impractical but disengaged from reality. Grief cannot be expressed through purely personal language because loss is never experienced outside social and institutional contexts. Neither seeking consolation nor embracing melancholia, these poets demonstrate how grief in our contemporary world must engage with the systems that often contribute to loss. They reveal how language, though regulated by power, can never be fully colonized: it contains within itself the seeds of its own reclamation.

What emerges from this reclamation could be termed the "institutional elegy"—a form defined by its dialectical engagement with bureaucratic language. The institutional elegy is characterized by several key features: it appropriates official formats while disrupting their intended functions; it maintains formal constraints while introducing elements these constraints were designed to exclude; it acknowledges the mediation of grief through commercial, military, and media systems while refusing to be limited by their logic; and it recognizes how private loss inevitably intersects with public history. Unlike traditional or modern elegies, which position themselves either in alignment with or opposition to social rituals of mourning, the institutional elegy inhabits the tension between compliance and resistance, between documentation and erasure, between the systematic and the intimate. But most importantly, the institutional elegy is defined by a fundamental poetic disobedience—not a rejection of institutional authority, but a refusal to allow such authority to determine what can and cannot be expressed.

This new poetic form suggests a possible evolution in poetry's social function. While poetry has often been marginalized as irrelevant to public discourse or reduced to purely personal expression, the institutional elegy demonstrates how poetic language can intervene in systems of power. When Vuong, Sharif, and Chang appropriate bureaucratic forms, they reveal how poetry might engage with other domains typically considered outside its purview: corporate communications, legal documents, technological interfaces, medical records, and other seemingly "unpoetic" discourses that nonetheless shape contemporary experience.

But more importantly to the modern writer, this approach transforms the act of writing itself into an act of resistance. Rather than positioning poetic creation as separate from or merely responsive to systems of power, it demonstrates how the creative process can directly engage with and transform the languages that structure experience. For writers working within bureaucratized societies, this represents a significant shift in how resistance might be conceptualized and practiced. Instead of seeking spaces untouched by institutional discourse (an increasingly impossible task), poets can engage with the languages of power from within, exploiting the gaps, contradictions, and resonances that exist in the most rigid forms.

What these poets teach us, finally, is that even in our most bureaucratized experiences, the possibility for authentic expression remains. Their work suggests that in a world where everything from birth to death leaves institutional traces, mourning itself must become a form of poetic disobedience: acknowledging the systems that mediate our losses while refusing to allow those systems to determine how we remember, who we grieve, or what constitutes a life worth commemorating. The institutional elegy thus offers not just a literary innovation but a model for how we might mourn in ways that both recognize institutional realities and insist on the profound significance of what institutional language typically excludes: the messy, contradictory, and deeply human dimensions of loss.