Hybrida: Poems (Paperback)

Description

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“One of the most important books of poetry to come along in years.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

Named a Best Book of 2019 by NPR and Publishers Weekly, Hybrida is a stirring and confident examination of mixed-race identity, violence, and history skillfully rendered through the lens of motherhood. In an agile blend of zuihitsu, ghazal, mosaic poems, and lyric essays, Tina Chang “evokes the bottomless love and terror of motherhood as she describes raising her mixed-race son” (New York Times). Ambitious and revelatory, Hybrida establishes Chang as one of the most vital voices of her generation.

About the Author

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Tina Chang is the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn, New York, where she lives.

Praise For…

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A breakthrough book.… [Tina Chang] tears apart categories that would define her kids into harm and she rages with a power that will have readers weeping and shouting.
— Brenda Shaughnessy - O, The Oprah Magazine

Chang weaves a bright gold thread of resistance.… [Her] explorations of motherhood are self-reflective, fiercely loving, and necessarily uncertain.
— Rachel Carroll - Los Angeles Review of Books

A tour-de-force of fury and love. Further proof that poetry’s power to negotiate polarized space explains why it’s so potent now.… [A] number of [these lyrics] ought to be anthologized into the next century.
— John Freeman - LitHub

[Chang] weaves powerful narratives and uses various poetic forms to create a momentous landscape.
— Elizabeth Lund - Washington Post

Through tender and restless poems about her son, Chang examines the ongoing violence against people of color in the U.S., offering a powerful testament of the role of imagination in cultivating empathy, and of the work remaining to be done to ensure the safety of society’s most vulnerable.
— Publishers Weekly

A beautiful meditation of home and hope and hurt.… There’s an earned gentleness to [Chang’s] lines?call them inspirational (imagine it: a poem can make us love each other better!). Hybrida is a song of love, and creation myths; or perhaps they are our creation truths.

— Millions

[Hybrida] grapples with mothering a mixed-race child in the precarity of the current political and social environment. Chang experiments with style and form.… [Her] untraditional conventions will ring true to many readers.

— Ms.

Chang writes with a wonderful sense of metaphor.… [She] speaks, whispers, and sometimes hisses these intense, urgent poems.
— Library Journal

In Hybrida’s poems of deep conscience and urgent compassion, I recognize [Tina Chang’s] fearless imagination and searching intelligence. I also find a new sense of need. These poems are clear-eyed and unblinking—written to save lives.

— Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate

With inexhaustible technical and emotional dexterity, Chang mixes and remixes social and familial resonances; reconfigures forms, myths, and prophecies; and records the hybrid sounds of love. Hybrida is a mature, masterful collection by a poet who never fails to astonish.

— Terrance Hayes, National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead and American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin