Hybrida: Poems

"In one of the most important books of poetry to come along in years, Tina Chang chronicles a mother’s harrowing and courageous passage through a psychic gantlet: “I know the world will find him / and tell him the history of his skin,” she writes of her young son, who is half-black. “Harm will come searching for him / and pour into him its scorching mercury, / its nails, its bitter breath against his boyhood / skin still smelling of milk and wonder.” In these poems, Chang plays my heartstrings like a guitar – and then rips them out."