Political Poetics: Kyle Carrero Lopez & Tina Chang

In their newly released poetry collections, poets Kyle Carrero Lopez (Party Line) and Tina Chang (Lion) follow themes of tension, violence, assumption, and art through both political moments and personal experiences. Whether considering US-Cuba relations like Lopez or the aftermath of the pandemic like Chang, both poets create richly compelling poems about our political moment. Moderated by fellow poet m. mick powell (Dead Girl Cameo).  

About Party Line:

Kyle Carrero Lopez’s electrifying debut collection centers three interconnected forces: social life, US-Cuba relations, and the lives of Black people in the United States and Cuba. Through familial, satirical, and geopolitical lenses, Party Line considers how countries—and people—wield power over those they have othered.

The collection features a series meditating on tensions embedded in party spaces. Carrero Lopez challenges assumptions that these spaces are apolitical or purely escapist, revealing unexpected connections between individuals’ actions and those of the state. His work expands bridges between US and Cuban art by developing an urgent poetics around the material conditions of the US embargo and challenging whitewashed images of Cuban Americans in the US imagination.

Alternating between humor and lyric severity, playfulness and political critique, these poems negotiate contradiction with linguistic dexterity and critical consciousness, proving that political poetry can be both serious and joyously alive.

About Lion:

An urgent exploration of Asian American identity from a poet with a “fearless imagination” (Tracy K. Smith, winner of the Pulitzer Prize).

In Lion, Tina Chang mines personal and collective memory to explore safety and danger, visibility and invisibility as an Asian American woman. Throughout the collection, Chang responds to multi-hyphenate women artists who create across various media: text, illustration, painting, video, sculpture. Artists include Haena Yoo, H?ng-Ân Truong, Astria Suparak, and a collective whose work paid tribute to the life of Christina Yuna Lee, who was murdered during the height of anti-Asian hate crimes, sparking cross-disciplinary dialogue on Asian American perspectives, surveillance, and the myth of the model minority.

As the aftermath of the pandemic is examined, so too are the structures of bias, racism, and violence that continue. The collection’s title explores the word’s cultural history, composite Chinese iconography, and lion-centered explorations of strength and mastery. Lion traverses the closeness and distance between the racialized self the world views and the perceived self who endures and survives.