Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art [Paperback]

Mong-Lan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 30, 2008

Welcome to the tango, sensual, elusive and alluring. In "Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art," Mong-Lan extends an invitation to explore with her the sensual world of Argentine tango through poetry and art. Her striking poetry and elegant pen & ink drawings of tango dancers illuminate and reveal this remarkable world in an original manner that captivates and intrigues, leaving you "breathless from its impassioned elaborations and imagistic intensity." Prize-winning poet, visual artist and Argentine tango dancer / teacher, Mong-Lan combines her talents and knowledge in one beautiful, luminous book. Mong-Lan's honors include the Juniper Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship in Vietnam, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, inclusion in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize Anthology volumes. Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries in the United States, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the U.S. Capitol House, and in public exhibitions in Tokyo, Seoul, Bali and Bangkok.

Product Details

• Paperback: 132 pages
• Publisher: Valiant Press (January 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0615188001
• ISBN-13: 978-0615188003
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,563,637 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular!, June 1, 2008

By 

Xuan Huong "Huong" (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art (Paperback)

"Tango, Tangoing" by Mong-Lan is spectacular and out of this world. A book of extraordinary poems on the tango, Argentine tango in particular; but not only this, she includes many of her beautiful, elegant pen and ink drawings of tango dancers. The drawings are incredible, something between Asian brush calligraphy and Matisse's drawings of dancers, a resplendant mixture of East and West. I have not seen anything like this on the tango, or literature/poetry about dance.

Here's what famous poets and critics have said about this volume on the back cover:

"While the ostensible subject here is dance, Mong-Lan is brilliant at suggesting layered, ever-shifting perspectives, meanings, and voices. These complex poems are, at times, aesthetic mediations, dissections of human relationships, internal monologues, and political inquiry. That Mong-Lan succeeds at such an ambitious project in writing that is visually striking, musically complex, unabashedly erotic and deeply intelligent, is testimony to her very great poetic talents. This is a marvelous book, one I'll return to again and again."--Kevin Prufer

"Mong-Lan's lyric poetry is unlike any others. The work sings, but it is not music alone that moves us; it's what we experience through the speaker's observational accuracy and emotional wisdom: 'The oscillatory / foolish / the insane / make their way / into tangos' and 'I would find you / locked in a mosquito's eye.' Consisting of three extraordinary poems about Argentine tango, the work is 'muy generoso,' as she quotes the dance itself as being, in its sweep and precision. The poems are not merely illustrative of the dance's famous forwardness; they reveal the transformative power of the commitment the dance requires: the finding of rhythm with another at the edge of mayhem, even as stillness is created at the center of the ochos, emblems of infinity, the dancers create on the floor." --Paul Hoover

"Improvisatory, epigrammatic, sensual, meditative, and always generous, Mong-Lan celebrates, as well as dissects, the intricacies and implications of the tango. Interweaving art with verse, this collection will leave you breathless from its impassioned elaborations and imagistic intensity." --Cyril Wong