PRAISE FOR HYBRIDA

ONE OF THE BEST POETRY BOOKS OF 2021 — OPRAH MAGAZINE

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 — NPR, PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

THE BEST REVIEWED BOOKS OF 2019 — LITERARY HUB

CONTRIBUTORS’ FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019 — PARIS REVIEW

THE BEST POETRY BOOKS OF 2019, A YEAR END LIST — BOOK SCROLLING

“Drawing on fairy tales, mixed-media visual art and other hybrid forms, Chang evokes the bottomless love and terror of motherhood as she describes raising her mixed-race son: “‘I know the world will find him / and tell him the history of his skin.’”— The New York Times Book Review

“Chang's third collection is one of the most important books of poetry to come along in years.” —NPR, 2019 Poetry Review

“Tina Chang's piercing Hybrida is a breakthrough book--more intimate, and messier, than Chang's signature radiance-- showing how deeply intertwined fear and love can be.” —The Oprah Magazine, 17 of the Best Poetry Books, as Recommended by Acclaimed Writers for National Poetry Month

“Hybrida explores how…discourses of racial purity and mixture, the linguistic legacies of transatlantic slavery and colonialism, continue to shape our understandings of race.” - Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Hybrida is at its core a book of forms—bodily, linguistic, and poetic. This collage-like mode makes Hybrida a stunning investigation of what textual form is and what it can do.” — Harvard Review

“Chang’s fragmentation is, at heart, an effort at coherence rather than a depiction of ruin; it represents the attempt of an inspired imagination to reconcile at times divergent aspects of a first-generation, twenty-first century American self, whether these are social, political, or simply corporeal.” — The Adroit Journal

“Chang weaves powerful narratives and uses various poetic forms to create a momentous landscape.” - The Washington Post, Best Poetry Collections, Aug 2019

“Tina Chang’s third collection moves like a tour-de-force of fury and love. Further proof that poetry’s power to negotiate polarized space explains why it’s so potent now.” —Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2019 

“Chang’s talent in capturing how our past breathes in our present makes for poems that feel birthed over years. Her lines are realistic, cautious, and yet ultimately optimistic.” —The Millions, Must Read Poetry May 2019

“Chang confronts notions of hybridity...which reckons with the fears and challenges of raising a mixed-race child in a heavily racialized society.” —Books are Magic, Most Anticipated Books of 2019

“In this timely, stirring collection, Chang confronts the complexities of raising a mixed-race child during an era of political upheaval in the United States.”
—Publisher’s Weekly, The Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2019

“Hybrida is a portrait of a mother’s fierce, unbreakable love, and the clarity that delivers her to some of the most painful yet necessary realizations about the racialized world that young people of color inhabit. It’s a steady eye that never turns away nor breaks it maternal focus. “ —The Common, Friday Reads November 2018

“I didn’t know the imagination could reach so many places with such various surfaces and depths — fearing for her son’s future, projecting scenes from the past with their injustices…fear for him, love for him, willing to take the sword for him.” - Washington Independent Review of Books

“This book is so beautiful and timely. I find myself reading it with my heart in my throat - having to remember to swallow. Tina's grace and ferocity in the face of what it means to mother a brown boy, to raise brown children in this particular moment in time, is everything so many of us - until now, didn’t have the words for. She breathes such amazing language into our fears. Teaches us to exhale again. So grateful for the stunning way she writes and the language she is teaching us to speak.” —Jacqueline Woodson National Ambassador For Young People’s Literature, Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Laureate 2018, Brown Girl Dreaming - National Book Award Winner, Another Brooklyn - National Book Award Finalist

“When he was born, our mutual exhaustion was a hybrid sound,” Tina Chang writes in this daring collection’s title poem. With inexhaustible technical and emotional dexterity, Chang mixes and remixes social and familial resonances; reconfigures forms, myths, and prophecies; and records the hybrid sounds of love. Hybrida is a mature, masterful collection by a poet who never fails to astonish.” —Terrance Hayes

“I have loved Tina Chang, and her work, since long before either of us were published poets. In Hybrida’s poems of deep conscience and urgent compassion, I recognize her fearless imagination and searching intelligence. I also find a new sense of need. These poems are clear-eyed and unblinking—written to save lives.” —Tracy K. Smith. U.S. Poet Laureate

“With keen resolve, abiding trepidation, and powerful empathy, Tina Chang explores what it takes to survive in these times.  Timeless concerns are intertwined with our shocking current events, often through the lenses of color and hybridity. Moreover, the collection itself is hybrid: lineated open verse, prose bursts, ekphrastic ventures, and list poems. HYBRIDA is glorious poetry.” –Kimiko Hahn