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Poems
by Tina Chang
An urgent exploration of Asian American identity from a poet with a "fearless imagination" (Tracy K. Smith, winner of the Pulitzer Prize).
In Lion, Tina Chang mines personal and collective memory to explore safety and danger, visibility and invisibility as an Asian American woman. Throughout the collection, Chang responds to multi-hyphenate women artists who create across various media: text, illustration, painting, video, sculpture. Artists include Haena Yoo, H?ng-Ân Truong, Astria Suparak, and a collective whose work paid tribute to the life of Christina Yuna Lee, who was murdered during the height of anti-Asian hate crimes, sparking cross-disciplinary dialogue on Asian American perspectives, surveillance, and the myth of the model minority.
As the aftermath of the pandemic is examined, so too are the structures of bias, racism, and violence that continue. The collection's title explores the word's cultural history, composite Chinese iconography, and lion-centered explorations of strength and mastery. Lion traverses the closeness and distance between the racialized self the world views and the perceived self who endures and survives.
"In this stunning collection, Tina Chang weaves lyric essay with ekphrastic poetry to delve into the constellation of myth, wound, and matriarchal inheritance that constitutes the Asian American female condition. With intimate authority and vulnerability, she articulates the tensions between her inner life and the anti-Asian racism that haunts American life, from bureaucratic indignities to the fatal violence during the Covid era. Lion is Tina Chang's most masterful collection yet." ―Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings
"Lion is a powerful, hypnotic book, one I can't stop praising because Tina Chang draws from tenderness, from family, from the unbroken line of women, weaving a lineage of mothers, grandmothers, daughters, 'a family swarming red like koi fish.' I love how she weaves us all in, even words move along the floor 'like spiders, weaving pebbles into place' and the earth beneath her 'hums,' and she 'crawls, then crouches, then stands.' May we all stand with her. Lion is a brave, wise book to live by." ―Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
This information about Lion was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tina Chang is the author of the poetry collections Hybrida, Of Gods & Strangers, Half-Lit Houses, and coeditor of the Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. She was the first female Poet Laureate of Brooklyn and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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