Hybrida
In this timely, assured collection, Tina Chang confronts the complexities of raising a mixed-race child during an era of political upheaval in the United States. She ruminates on the relationship between her son’s blackness and his safety, exploring the dangers of childhood in a post–Trayvon Martin era and invoking racialized roles in fairy tales. Against the stark urban landscapes of threat and surveillance, Chang returns to the language of mothers.
Reviews
Of Gods & Strangers
A meditation on history and the imagination that bears witness to acts of genocide and to natural disasters in Ethiopia, Haiti, and Sri Lanka, Of Gods & Strangers interweaves lyrical, arresting accounts of our contemporary world with stories of "Empress Dowager" Tzu Hsi, last empress of China (1861-1908). An urgent reminder that poetry can offer us a social consciousness--"in my locked mouth an urge"--Of Gods & Strangers deftly traces the human dimensions of the "great modern machine," looking to recover "a future shining from the void."
Half-Lit Houses
This collection of poetry documents a young girl’s very beginnings, the loss of her father, the father’s presence as a mythical figure in the speaker’s life. The collection is also punctuated by a movement backward in history, specifically to Hunan, China in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. By moving backward, the speaker begins to imagine her life as a continuance of a long ancestry of loss and acceptance.
Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry From the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond
A landmark anthology, providing the most ambitious, far-reaching collection of contemporary Asian and Middle Eastern poetry available. Language for a New Century celebrates the artistic and cultural forces flourishing today in the East, bringing together an unprecedented selection of works by South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian poets as well as poets living in the Diaspora. In an age of violence and terrorism—often predicated by cultural ignorance—this anthology is a bold declaration of shared humanness and devotion to the transformative power of art.