RaveHarvard Review OnlineWith its poems of motherhood, of childhood, of race and difference, of being and loving, and of the body, Tina Chang’s Hybrida offers readers plenty to hold on to ... Hybrida is at its core a book of forms—bodily, linguistic, and poetic. Chang brings together poetic structures ... This collage-like mode makes Hybrida a stunning investigation of what textual form is and what it can do ... Chang exhibits her interest in the capacities of different poetic forms to carry both emotional vulnerability and incisive social critique ... The lyric poems of Hybrida are also a kind of singing—and Chang gets them just right.
Analicia Sotelo
RaveHarvard Review\'We were really getting down,\' writes Analicia Sotelo in Virgin, \'dancing hard on the injury.\' Sotelo’s poems do just that, with an insistent force that commands attention and dares readers to dance along ... Ultimately, Sotelo’s poems demand and perform necessary revisions of that definition, reclaiming the concept of femininity and revealing its inherent power ... One of the most powerful ways in which Sotelo shows us how far a female mind can go is through her adoption and reworking of Ariadne, the mythologized Cretan princess ... Virgin is the inaugural winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, and it’s not difficult to see why. Sotelo’s poems are sure of themselves, firmly authoritative and unflinching.
