"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."
"[Chang] weaves powerful narratives and uses various poetic forms to create a momentous landscape."
"Chang weaves a bright gold thread of resistance.… [Her] explorations of motherhood are self-reflective, fiercely loving, and necessarily uncertain."
Los Angeles Review of Books - Rachel Carroll
"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."
"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."
"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."
O, The Oprah Magazine - Brenda Shaughnessy
"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."
★ 05/20/2019
The title of Chang’s third collection signals a fusion of disparate elements, a hybrid that’s been seemingly feminized. This mélange appears across an impressive array of forms: prose poems, ghazals, responses to artworks (by Alexandria Smith and Kara Walker, for example), the several-page “Bitch” and “Creation Myth,” as well as verse that explores Chang’s personal history. Primarily, though, this is a book about the speaker’s son: her love for him, and how she and he negotiate his blackness in the world. In the opening poem, “He, Pronoun,” she writes: “I have a right to fear for him,// though I have no right to claim his color./ His blackness is his to own and what will// my mouth say of that sweetness.” The poem closes on the image of her son in her lap, a quotidian moment, but they “watch the door.” With more urgency than a news article could achieve, Chang conveys the fear and rage at the reality that the color of her son’s skin will mean she is unable to keep him safe. The title poem, subtitled “a zuihitsu,” is a collage of questions and observations about identity, which at its end suggests hope for the future: “Wilderness/ of the mind. But it’s changing.” (May)
05/01/2019
As its title poem suggests, this new collection from Brooklyn poet laureate Chang (Of Gods and Strangers ) is itself a hybrid consisting of variations of haiku, ekphrastic poems, free verse, list poems, sonnets, ghazels, prose poems, and terza rima. Here, Chang draws from her own experiences, stories from the Bible, fairy tales, and contemporary news accounts, as well as from other poets. The poem "276," for example, refers both to Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "The Windhover" and several reports about the kidnapping of Nigerian school girls. In many of these pieces, Chang worries about the safety of her son and especially his future as he grows to manhood. She also muses on African American youth such as Michael Brown, who are unfairly treated by law enforcement, with the implied message that her son, too, could be harmed. Although some poems seem too politicized, it helps that Chang writes with a wonderful sense of metaphor, as in "my son senses what is happening/ on the street, his heart fiercely tethered/ to mine" or "hair rushing to the waist like ink." VERDICT A mysterious I-narrator speaks, whispers, and sometimes hisses these intense, urgent poems, which ultimately form a lament. For academic holdings and public collections that include a political or own voices element.—C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD
