Lion: Poems

An urgent exploration of Asian American identity from a poet with a “fearless imagination” (Tracy K. Smith, winner of the Pulitzer Prize).

In Lion, Tina Chang mines personal and collective memory to explore safety and danger, visibility and invisibility as an Asian American woman. Throughout the collection, Chang responds to multi-hyphenate women artists, including Haena Yoo, H?ng-Ân Truong, Astria Suparak, and a collective whose work paid tribute to the life of Christina Yuna Lee, a young woman who was killed during the height of anti-Asian hate crimes. Responding to art across various media—text, illustration, painting, video, and sculpture—Lion sparks cross-disciplinary dialogue on Asian American perspectives, surveillance, and the myth of the model minority.

As the aftermath of the pandemic is examined, so too are the structures of bias, racism, and violence that continue. The collection’s title explores the word’s cultural history, composite Chinese iconography, and lion-centered explorations of strength and mastery. Lion traverses the closeness and distance between the racialized self the world views and the perceived self who endures and survives.

From “Text:”

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.