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.

Author: Marilyn Chin
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 07/17/2003
Pages: 110
Weight: 0.36lbs
Size: 8.24h x 5.50w x 0.42d
ISBN: 9780393324532

About the Author
Chin, Marilyn: - Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of four previous poetry collections and a novel. She is the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a Radcliffe Institute fellowship, among other honors. Presently, she serves as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in San Diego.