A new book of poetry from Marilyn Chin, titled Hard Love Province, came out in 2014. It is a collection of new elegies, love songs and playful quatrains.
Emotionally nuanced and electric with high-flying verbal experimentation, image after image, line by line, Chin’s spectacular reinventions, her sonnets, allegories and poems are unforgettable.
When is an elegy a canary singing, while a crow eats the carrion of the canary owner– Where heaven and hell snap fingers together to make a song of gleeful death– Where “poetry makes nothing happen”– Though everything is happening here in the chaos of grief? In these poem-songs counterparts make a counterpoint of sorrow and glee. It’s all happening here, in this book, Chin’s most inspired and inspiring collection yet — Joy Harjo, author of Crazy Brave.
Marilyn Chin is a poet acclaimed by Adrienne Rich for her “powerful, uncompromised, and unerring” poems. Dancing brilliantly between Eastern and Western forms, fusing ancient Chinese history and contemporary American popular culture, she is one of the most celebrated Asian-American poets writing today.
Pared down to a minimum, Marilyn Chin’s poems are both ancient and modern, noble and simple, transparent and mystifying. She is striving to recapture a grand poetry of the past as she mourns the loss of love, language, and literature. Mixing East and West aesthetics with formal and free verse, she writes poems with a fervor that is daring, breathless, and original. She is the Tu Fu of American poetry — Henri Cole, author of Pierce the Skin.
high-octane elegy that mourns the beloved even as it implicates the mixed-up world the beloved has left behind. Chin transforms the haiku, no longer confining it to reflections on natural beauty, but turning it into an obliterator of identity — Publishers Weekly.
Open this book; Chin will teach you. Listen to her speak — Annie Won
Hard Love Province’s multi-formed, multi-voiced and rhythmic unfolding is complex, compelling and human – Amanda Fuller
a book by a poet who is capable, at the other end of the gamut, of a beautiful tercet — Bruce Whiteman
Individual Poems Online
Brown Girl Manifesto, Twenty Five Haiku, Beautiful Boyfriend, Formosan Elegy on Poetry Foundation site.
Brown Girl Manifesto read by Marilyn Chin, with commentary.
Two Inch Fables as Poem-a-Day on Poets.org site.
Quiet the Dog, Tether the Pony, One Child Has Brown Eyes on Poets.org
Alba: Moon Camellia Lover on Poetry Daily site.
Alba: Moon Camellia Lover, Beautiful Boyfriend, One Child Has Brown Eyes, Black President, Twenty Five Haiku read by Marilyn Chin, in a podcast by Poets and Writers.
Publisher’s PRESS RELEASE
