Bite Hard - by Justin Chin (Paperback)

About the Book

The first collection by award-winning poet Justin Chin. He explores his identity as Asian, gay, and a lover.

Book Synopsis

The first collection by award-winning performance artist/poet Justin Chin. In Bite Hard, Chin explores his identity as an Asian, a gay man, an artist, and a lover. He rails against both his own life experiences and society's limitations and stereotypes with scathing humor, bare-bones honesty, and unblinking detail. Whether addressing what really goes on in the kitchen of Chinese restaurants or a series of ex-boyfriends, all named Michael, Chin displays his remarkable emotional range and voice as a poet. His raw, incantatory, stream-of-consciousness poems confront issues of race, desire, and loss with a compelling urgency that reflects his work as in performance, speaking directly to an audience. Throughout this collection, Chin demonstrates his uncanny ability to convey thought-provoking viewpoints on a variety of controversial subjects.

Review Quotes

He plugs the stage microphone into the page and lyrically blasts the heart of our fears, rage, and import-export nightmarish dreams. - Award-winning author R. Zamora Linmark

About the Author

Justin Chin is the author of two collections of poetry, Harmless Medicine and Bite Hard (Manic D Press), and two collections of essays, Burden of Ashes (Alyson Press) and Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks (St. Martin's Press). In the 1990's, as a performance artist, he created several performance works that were presented nationally and abroad. He lives in San Francisco.