A fusion of east and west, high culture, popular culture, and ancient Chinese history mark this distinguished collection.
Marilyn Chin, with her multilayered, multidimensional, intercultural singing, elegizes the loss of her mother and maternal grandmother and tries to unravel the complexities of her family's past. She tells of the trials of immigration, of exile, of thwarted interracial love, and of social injustice. Some poems recall the Confucian "Book of Songs," while others echo the African American blues tradition and Western railroad ballads. The title poem references the Han Dynasty rhapsody but is also a wild, associative tour de force. Political allegories sing out with personal revelations. Personal revelations open up to a universal cry for compassion and healing. These songs emerge as a powerful and elegant collection: sophisticated yet moving, hard-hitting yet refined.
About the Author
Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of five previous poetry collections and a novel. Her work has appeared in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, and Best American Poetry, among other publications. She is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and fellowships from the United States Artists Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, among other honors. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she lives in San Diego, California.
Praise For…
Impeccable form holds seething emotion as Chin...looks from East to West and back again. — Donna Seaman - Booklist
Chin's creativity as a poet is undeniable, as she physically shapes poems into images and breaks traditional forms. — Nhien Nguyen - International Examiner
Chin's dazzling longing creates a past that becomes essential to our understanding of her elliptical and passionately insistent poetic statement. — Carol Muske-Dukes - Los Angeles Times Book Review
These are poems of burgeoning praise and heartfelt vision for the new century. — John Gery - New Orleans Times Picayune
Marilyn Chin's new poems are unmistakable evidence of the universal reach of the particular—when the art is powerful, uncompromised, and unerring as hers. — Adrienne Rich
