Tina Chang - Böcker

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. Some poets, such as Bei Dao and Mahmoud Darwish, are acclaimed worldwide, but many more will be new to the reader. The collection includes 400 unique voices—political and apolitical, monastic and erotic—that represent a wider artistic movement that challenges thousand-year-old traditions, broadening our notion of contemporary literature. Each section of the anthology—organized by theme rather than by national affiliation—is preceded by a personal essay from the editors that introduces the poetry and exhorts readers to examine their own identities in light of these powerful poems. In an age of violence and terrorism, often predicated by cultural ignorance, this anthology is a bold declaration of shared humanity and devotion to the transformative power of art.

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 racialised roles in fairy tales. Against the stark urban landscapes of threat and surveillance, Chang returns to the language of mothers.Meditating on the lives of Michael Brown, Leiby Kletzky and Noemi Álvarez Quillay—lost at the hands of individuals entrusted to protect them—Chang creates hybrid poetic forms that mirror her investigation of racial tensions. Through an agile blend of zuihitsu, ghazal, prose poems, mosaic poems and lyric essays, Hybrida envisions a childhood of mixed race as one that is complex, emotionally wrought and often vulnerable. Hybrida is a twenty-first-century tale that is equal parts a mother’s love and her fury, an ambitious and revelatory exploration of identity that establishes Tina Chang as one of the most vital voices of her generation.

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.Meditating on the lives of Michael Brown, Leiby Kletzky, and Noemi Álvarez Quillay—lost at the hands of individuals entrusted to protect them—Chang creates hybrid poetic forms that mirror her investigation of racial tensions. Through an agile blend of zuihitsu, ghazal, prose poems, mosaic poems, and lyric essays, Hybrida envisions a childhood of mixed race as one that is complex, emotionally wrought, and often vulnerable. Hybrida is a twenty-first-century tale that is equal parts a mother’s love and her fury, an ambitious and revelatory exploration of identity that establishes Tina Chang as one of the most vital voices of her generation.

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.