New poetry collection addresses the visibility of Asian American women

It was music when the lion walked into my home.

I thought I felt it lick my palm. I bent low to the ground,

to watch it craving though I was starving too.

The tongue touches a valley inside the mouth,

only wounding can reach. The body of a gazelle

runs wildly inside my knotted heart. The beast

struggles within, bones lit with grief, a rush

of pursuit, sings me into the skin of the living. 

— an excerpt from Tina Chang’s poem “Text,” in LION

Traditionally considered an image of masculine power, the lion roams through the poems in Tina Chang’s latest collection — then takes an unexpected turn.

Scheduled for release on Oct. 6 by W.W. Norton, LION is her first new collection of poetry since Hybrida in 2019. In it, the Binghamton University English professor explores safety and danger, visibility and invisibility as an Asian American woman, the aftermath of the pandemic, and the structure of bias, racism, and violence, all in interdisciplinary conversation with women artists. 

“I was delivered to the guiding figures of Asian American women, artists, and the spirits that created spaces for me to walk alongside them,” she said.

The first female Poet Laureate of Brooklyn, Chang is also the author of the poetry collections Of Gods & Strangers and Half-Lit Houses, and co-editor of the Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond.

LION took seven years to write, which is typical for Chang’s book-length works. And like her previous books, it was born of necessity.

In 2021, a gunman killed eight people at two spas and a massage parlor in Atlanta, Georgia; six of the victims were women of Asian descent. In January 2022, Michelle Alyssa Go died after she was pushed in the path of a New York City subway train; a month later, Christina Yuna Lee was stabbed to death in her New York City apartment.

“I was overcome with anger and grief as I reflected on the lives of Asian American women who were senselessly killed during the COVID era and the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes,” Chang reflected. “To understand their beginnings as opposed to their end, I began researching the lives of Michelle and Christina.”

Her search led her to her voice, penetrates earth’s floor, a group art exhibition hosted by the Eli Klein Gallery, where Lee had worked for four years. The name comes from a line in the 1982 book Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, an artist who was murdered a week after its publication. The exhibition, curated by stephanie mei huang, featured nine Asian-American women artists who paid tribute to Lee’s life. 

Chang explored the collective’s artwork and responded with poetry. As her manuscript took shape, she met online with each artist to discuss their vision and approach. These conversations sparked additional poems, leading to the completion of LION.

Predator and prey

The book begins with a suite of poems called “The Document of Invisibility.” In them, a speaker witnesses her own birth, her attempted erasure by external forces, and her survival through communal insistence.  

“There are many forms of violence against communities of color, immigrant communities, refugee communities, individuals, and groups considered ‘other.’ We see this reflected in our current culture, where to claim one’s identity is to be visible,” Chang said. 

The image of the lion runs throughout the book. In Chinese culture, lions are also referred to as fu dogs and are seen as an amalgamation of many creatures, including the dragon, tortoise, phoenix, and snake. 

“I chose the word lion as I’m consciously claiming a domain traditionally dominated by men and calling attention to spaces that exclude women,” Chang said. “The figure of the lion represents an archetype of authority while remaining sensitive to the experience of living in a woman’s body.”

Currently, she’s three-quarters of the way through the creation of a new poetry collection that focuses on caregiving, and the spiritual and physical ramifications of caring for another person’s life. In the book, a husband is diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer; the poems therein focus on the complexity of love and mortality, and the transformation of the patient and caregiver both.

This latest project was inspired by Richard Wright’s collection, Haiku: This Other World, written during the final 18 months of his life. Wright wrote nearly 4,000 haiku after his lung cancer diagnosis, as a way to capture “moments of lucidity between waves of pain.”

“He saw each haiku as a breath, an inhale or exhale when he could no longer speak,” Chang said. “Similarly, I focus on the breath as proof of life in the smallest minutiae. The COVID era taught us about the value of breath and breathing, the common denominator that unites us all.”