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In 2018, Michael Ting shocked the slam poetry community when he became the first Chinese-American to win the Individual World Poetry Slam in San Diego, CA, and hold the title of Individual World Champion. Past winners such as Rudy Francisco, Ed Mabrey, and Buddy Wakefield have become household names for poetry lovers around the world, while former competitors like Brandon Leake, Elizabeth Acevedo, Michael Harriot, and Hanif Abdurraqib have gone on to become international celebrities for their captivating performance, spellbinding writing, and generation-defining prose.
In this timely, debut collection, Michael Ting challenges the notion that the Asian-American identity is a cheap copy - a novelty - of someone else’s American Dream, insisting that the reader take a deeper look at the stories, viewpoints, and challenges that define him and a generation of Asian Americans looking to find their voice. After a year marked by both heartbreaking violence against Asian diasporic communities and breakthrough moments of representation in popular culture, this debut collection adds a critical piece of commentary that will leave the reader with a more complicated, expansive, and layered perspective.
From playground assimilations to flipped microaggressions, misplaced masculinity to culinary confessionals, Ting takes the reader on a journey through some of his most hard-earned lessons in a way that only a world class slam poet can. Balancing his trademark wit and humor with gut-punching truths, these poems may just transform your understanding of Asian-Americans, but perhaps more importantly in this moment, yourself.
