A rebellious, refined, provocative, and audacious volume from award-winning poet Marilyn Chin. In her galvanizing sixth collection of poems, Marilyn Chin once again turns moral outrage into unforgettable art. A rambunctious take on our contemporary condition, Sage shifts skillfully in tone and register from powerful poems on social justice and the pandemic to Daoist wild girl satire. A self-described "activist-subversive-radical-immigrant-feminist-transnational-Buddhist-neoclassical-nerd poet," Chin is always reinventing herself. In Sage , she sings fearless identity anthems, pulls farcical details from an old diary, and confronts the disturbing rise in violence against Asian Americans. Leaping between colloquialisms and vivid imagery, anger and humor, she merges the personal and political with singular, resilient spirit. Whether she is spinning tall tales, mixing Chinese poems with hip-hop rhymes, reinventing lovelorn folk songs with a new-world anxiety, or penning a raucous birthday poem, a heartrending elegy, or an "un-gratitude" prayer, Chin offers dazzling surprises at every turn. "[Marilyn] Chin writes with a fierce vulnerability. Sharing her deeply personal yet relatable experience during the pandemic, Sage is a window to the intense musings of a longtime activist poet that never rests. Both sage and succulent, [Chin] is a poet that holds your hand while she spins you at 100mph. Sage leaves you dazed and breathless, a profound feeling that stays with you, long after you’ve finished reading." ― Thi Nguyen, Poetry Society of America "At the height of her poetic powers, Marilyn Chin channels Sage , alter ego, orator of sins, praise, urgency, and truth. There is a sharp edge at the end of each epiphany, as fine as a needle, edging close to the heart. Chin approaches national subjects such as democracy, immigration, and injustice as well as the quieter interior subject of artistic creation. Sage is a brazen songstress who 'enters the doorless door and breaks the knob,' and by all accounts is as tender as she is powerful, vulnerable as well as mighty. Sage reveals our 21st century complexities, straddling ruin and utter magic." ― Tina Chang, author of Hybrida "Marilyn Chin’s sharp-witted and fresh sixth collection, Sage , speaks to the current moment with the gravitas, humor, and bite missing from many a pandemic-born collection." ― Rebecca Morgan Frank, LitHub "Chin is an accomplished poet, and she bends the rules to her advantage. Her gorgeous poems make vivid points about identity, life, death, conflict, and art." ― Alta Journal "A kaleidoscopic, mesmerizing, playful collection of beauty in the vernacular, Sage weaves together [Marilyn Chin's] knowledge of ancient traditions and American popular culture. Chin’s gifts of Daoist humor, literary scholarship, and, above all, poetic experimentation attest to her attention to form and rebellion. Chin’s poetry celebrates, grieves, and even mocks human seriousness about our limited time on earth. She is a poet who witnesses our violences, joys, and human foibles and demands that we do not look away." ― Pamela J. Rader, Rocky Mountain Review Praise for Marilyn Chin “With biting sarcasm and caustic tone (just two of the weapons in her rhetorical arsenal), [Marilyn Chin] makes individual despair an allegory for society’s ills, in a larger process of unifying opposites, formally joining East with West, thematically conflating life with death, as of course they always are.… She inflects received concepts and categories with a vision of meaningful, hidden connection.” ―Henry Louis Gates Jr., Anisfield-Wolf Book Award chair “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.” ―Adrienne Rich “In [Marilyn Chin’s] poem-songs, counterparts make a counterpoint of sorrow and glee.” ―Joy Harjo “[Chin’s] poems combine sumptuous imagery and a startling, articulate intelligence to explore and record the horrifying as well as the satisfying, the seductive components of hyphenated American identity.” ―June Jordan “In true pioneering spirit, Hong Kong-born Marilyn Chin both celebrates her hyphenated heritage and rues the conflicts that arise from her daily interface with the mainstream. Her writing is electric and more than a little mischievous; she is cagey in the way that any good prophetess knows is the way to survive.” ―Rita Dove, Washington Post “Chin’s dazzling longing creates a past that becomes essential to our understanding of her elliptical and passionately insistent poetic statement.” ―Carol Muske Dukes, Los Angeles Times Marilyn Chin has authored six poetry collections and a novel. She appears in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary P