A Portrait of the Self as Nation: A Craft Talk with Marilyn Chin

Born in Hong Kong, award-winning feminist poet Marilyn Chin maps immigrant and transnational identity in poems that are aesthetically wide-ranging and deft, making use of both Eastern and Western literary forms and cultural referents drawn from Chinese history and American popular culture. As Adrienne Rich has said of her work, “Marilyn Chin’s poems excite and incite the imagination through their brilliant cultural interfacings, their theatre of anger, ‘fierce and tender,’ their compassion, and their high mockery of wit. Reading her, our sense of the possibilities of poetry is opened further, and we feel again what an active, powerful art it can be.” She is the author of five poetry books, including this year’s A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems, and a novel.