I’m not entirely sure how to put this, but there are poems that use language to suggest an experience or impression which is completed by the reader and so have an adaptive, meaningful quality. Then there are poems which try to take that feeling of the just-beyond-words and nail it down using words, so that all selfness of the poetic experience is retained by the author and none is extended to the reader to access.

I think that this latter category relies more heavily on formatting to convey that it is in fact poetry, and tellingly that was my experience reading Chang. Both the obituary structure and the actual formatting on the page seemed designed to convince me I was reading poetry, but instead it felt like a non-traditional and inaccessible memoir of a woman losing her parents to old age and death. Obit is another victim of the frenzy for making personal writing unnecessarily public.