Victoria Chang Victoria Chang, poet and author of “Obit,” a finalist for a 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize in Poetry, reads from her collection on the L.A. Times’ Virtual Poetry Stage. Watch here: If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. It happened before she expected it: Victoria Chang’s parents were struck by illness. First her father was severely debilitated by a stroke; then her mother died. She felt so isolated by caregiving that she started writing down her anger, her fear, her frustration in notebooks that eventually became the poems in “Obit,” a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. Their form is innovative, a thin short column down the middle of each page, playing off the traditions of a newspaper obituary.