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Today's poem is "Invention"
from Half-Lit Houses

Four Way Books

Tina Chang's poems have appeared in Indiana Review,The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, and Sonora Review, among others. Her poems have been anthologized in Identity Lessons (Penguin Putnum, 1999), Poetry Nation (Vehicule Press, 1998), Asian American Literature (McGraw-Hill, 2001) and Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004). She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, and the Van Lier Foundation, and she has held writing fellowships from Fundación Valparaíso, The MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Villa Montalvo.

About Half-Lit Houses:

"Her mouth is fertile, seeded with incidents from a family history that lay scattered about like grains of rice upon which our poet kneels. Misfit and starlet, she wrestles with her father on earth and in Heaven. Whether seasoned with gunpowder or with sugar, Tina Chang's legacy is neither entirely Chinese nor American but an inheritance to be spoken through dialects—a composite language forged out of her many lyrical selves."
—Timothy Liu

"Tina Chang's poems perform the ancient tasks of remembrance, recovery, and praise. This work seeks to account for a life in the context of the myths, cultural and familial, that both nurture and threaten that very life and the voice that might sing it into legend. This is a poetry of amazing lushness, melancholy and affirmation."
—Li-Young Lee



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