Tina Chang

Brooklyn Poet Laureate, Tina Chang, was raised in New York City. She is the author of the poetry collections Half-Lit Houses and Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way Books) and co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008) along with Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar. Her poems have appeared in American Poet, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and The New York Times among others.

Her work has also been anthologized in Identity Lessons, Poetry Nation, Asian American Literature, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems and in Poetry 30: Poets in Their Thirties. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, and the Van Lier Foundation among others.

She currently teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.

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LR: You have spoken of how your role as Brooklyn Poet Laureate has led to a greater sense of moral responsibility, and at Sarah Lawrence College, you even teach a class called “Poet as World Citizen.” How does this sense of responsibility play out for you in your writing?

TC: In my role as poet laureate, there is a public connection and recognition of matters that are important to me: education, literacy, the Asian American experience, the female experience, motherhood. These are only a few of the topics to which I pledge loyalty, and those communities have helped me feel a firmer footing in a sometimes uncertain world.

When I conceived of the class “Poet As World Citizen,” I envisioned a student who never loses their sense of themselves as an active participant in a world in flux. I can no longer live in a vacuum, and I think our literature and the study of it must reflect that. I can no longer write a domestic kind of poetry which doesn’t call attention to the complexities outside of the United States. Because I teach and I engage in my community, I feel invested in ongoing dialogue, a dialogue of exposure, questioning, and investigation. I bring all of this to the page when I write.

LR: In a video you made for Poets.org entitled “The Poetics of Multi-tasking,” you speak of the pleasures and the difficulties of embodying the multiple roles of writer, poet laureate, educator, mother, and public servant all at once. How have these different roles emerged and evolved in your work?

TC: All of these roles are a part of me, but they do not always meld together in the most graceful of ways. There are days when I am a good mother but I have not written as much as I would have liked. There are other days when I’ve been an effective laureate but I was not able to put my children to bed. The list goes on. I consider myself lucky, though, to have entrée into these many different lives and sides of myself. How fortunate in this life that I am able to speak about language and ideas and then experience the bliss of returning home to find my apartment in complete disarray, my son and daughter running to hug me with their arms wrapped around my legs.

Ultimately, I have grown as result of all of this. I’m at a place in my life where I practice what I love and I work with students who I consider my peers in intellect and maturity in many ways. We are blessed to talk about books and the weight of poetry. I think about many of our discussions as I write. Similarly, I am affected by my work as poet laureate. I work with communities of people who are vastly different from me. I work with servants to the art of literature and I am humbled by their dedication and service. Each word I write and each project I take on, I am trying to honor them in some way.

LR: You have spoken very openly about experiencing writer’s block in the wake of 9/11. How did that period of silence change the way you write, and how do you manage writer’s block now?

TC: When I finally came out of that silence and writer’s block, the words poured from me. I was angry, shocked, in grief. I think when someone is working from that place of emotional immediacy, that sincerity of expression is palpable. There are still moments when I wonder when the next poem will come to me, but there is a deeper faith now. After you’ve been in a dark place for a long time, when you come into the light, it’s the light that becomes your new shelter. In that way, I’m living in that light now. I don’t doubt myself or my language anymore. What came out of that time was an unshakable belief that poetry is as alive as a civilization or a world.

LR: Can you walk us through the typical evolution of one of your poems? How is it born? How do you revise? How do you know when it’s finished?

TC: My process has changed tremendously since I’ve had my children. I once had long, languid days that unfurled in one fluid gesture of creation. At night, I shared my ideas with other writers or friends and that would give life to other poems. These days, after I have fed, napped, entertained, bathed, changed, and put my children to bed, I have my dinner, put on my shoes, and head to the rented office around the corner.

Nowadays, my creativity is summoned within a two-hour time span. In this way, my writing has become more efficient. I will keep mental notes during the day as I run around playgrounds and do the laundry. Those notes will then find their way into poems by evening. I then type furiously. The objective is to keep my hands moving and if my hands are moving my mind is working.

I sometimes have many pages of text. In subsequent visits or drafts, the poems will come into fuller form. Over the course of the next couple of months I’ll see a relationship among my poems and I’ll ask them what they are saying to one another. Once I sense some answers, the poems will develop their own identity and the theme/obsessions of my work will rise to the surface in more realized poems.

I don’t think poems are ever finished. I have been known to cross out words and add lines to my books of poetry. If I am not happy with a line before a reading, I’ll gladly edit the text in my book so that I’ll feel comfortable reading it to an audience. Text and language is alive so it’s always changing. To me, there is no end point and that is a joy.

LR: With two books now under your belt, what is your process for putting together a manuscript?

TC: With my first manuscript, I had no concept that I was writing a book at all. I was writing individual poems which focused on family, loss, and redemption. Only when the pile of my poems became quite large did I think I should organize them and send them out to be considered for publication. I was lucky when Four Way Books accepted the book. With my second collection, there was a greater consciousness that I was making a book. I was aware of subject, theme, obsession and the systems by which ideas were tied together. Orchestration of poems is a different kind of negotiation, and the second collection taught me about vision. Now, I am experiencing the excitement of working on my third collection, and I’m in that elated place of making work for the sheer pleasure of making it. A year from now, I will have to go through the process of finding a home for them in a larger collection. For now, I’m happy to sit with the poems as independent entities.

LR: In Of Gods & Strangers, you seem to be exploring the tension between individual vs. collective identity by juxtaposing several modes of the first person. In some places, you rely on the intimate first person singular to convey your narrative, while in others, you use the first person plural, or employ a more distant, “projected” first person through the use of persona. Can you speak more about this tension between the personal and the universal, and how it plays into your vision for the book?

OF GODS & STRANGERS

TC: The negotiations you speak of were exactly the struggles I was encountering as I was living and also writing this book. It was very hard to come to terms with the validity of my existence as a writer during this time. What was my individual experience worth in a time when the collective was in such distress and danger? Our continuing war, our economy, our lack of compassionate and wise leadership, the fall of our faith. The great “We” was really suffering as a nation and a tribe. I felt these struggles each day and I also pushed forward to give expression to this.

As I result, I found a figure like the Empress Dowager while writing the book. I could place that mask on, that persona, and find my power. In her stature and unapologetic gestures, I found a place to be certain and steady. By reaching back to this historical figure and distant first person, I found my footing, and with that power I felt an ability to unleash what I was feeling about our current American and transnational dramas.

I took a great risk with the first poem of the book, “Unfinished Book of Mortals.” It’s a long poem that seeks to tell the story of the last ten years in America. That’s pretty audacious to begin with. Each line is preceded by a roman numeral which I imagine to be the headings of individual chapters of the book of our time. The president, Chinese myth, and present/past lovers are involved. Anything seems for the taking as public and private domains blur. I am seeking to tell the universal story of our collective hurt, damage, and resilience while employing the personal first person. This type of internal negotiation feels at the heart of my process of writing Of Gods & Strangers.

LR: There is a distinctive dreamlike quality to Of Gods & Strangers. How much do you rely on dreams for inspiration, and how do you tap into your unconscious mind when working?

TC: In the final pages of the book, there is a section called “Author’s Notes on Imaginary Poems.” Many of these final poems were inspired by dreams. Though they appear at the end of the book, they were the earliest poems that were written and provided me with the vision for the book.

In the days after 9/11, I had a difficult time sleeping, and when I fell asleep I would have nightmares. Many months later, I had a dream that I was riding on a train and as the train headed outdoors, I could see the Twin Towers. The towers were no longer made of brick and steel but of sheets of paper, and they floated away leaf by leaf. I pressed my face to the train’s window as if I could somehow keep the buildings together by sheer will and imagination. I wanted everything to stay intact and yet the wind kept blowing, the pages lifted and were carried away by the wind like spirits until the buildings disappeared. And in my poem, I wrote, “In a dream city constructed from paper, flames were lit. My God . . .” So many of my poems are written in this way, so dream plays a large part in my writing. Sometimes there are visions that I wake to or just the flavor of something I cannot name. I struggle to name it. There are other times when I can see a scene vividly in a daydream. I know I was not there, but I can summon the environment or characters as if I lived that life.

As a writer progresses, it becomes more intuitive and organic to tap into the subconscious state. It’s as if I am taking dictation. I am listening carefully and the words write themselves.

LR: What is the best piece of advice you have received about the writing life?

TC: “Never stop writing,” said my graduate writing professor when I stepped out the doors of Columbia University. I was petrified. I had no idea what I was going to do as a poet. I felt crazy. Through the years, those words of advice kept coming back to me in my darkest times as a writer. This piece of advice which seemed so simple and so small saved me time and time again.

LR: What has motivated you through times of uncertainty as a poet?

TC: I’m a part of a small community of writers who I trust with everything: my writing, my confidence, my life. They have sustained me. There were times when I wondered, “Who is reading the work? Who is reading poetry?” They were present to say, “I am. I am reading poetry. I hear your voice.” I felt their presence in each stage of my writer’s life. There were times when they took extreme measures: throwing a blank notebook in my direction, or even yelling at me in an effort to express the importance of art, creation, process, or self-worth in relation to all of that. They reminded me that if I followed this path, I could fulfill my destiny.

LR: In the 2010 Publishers Weekly article entitled “Why I Write,” you wrote that, ever since having been sent from the US as a toddler to live in Taiwan after your father passed away, the “recollection of language is at the core of who I am, why I work, why I write. I write in order to capture what is no longer there: sweet ghost of minutes, mist covering the thatched roofs, vendors calling out their wares to the windows, typhoon rattling the red door of my childhood home in summer.” At the same time, many of your poems (such as “Duality”) seem deeply grounded in a sense of being an American, a New Yorker, and Brooklynite. As you straddle and thus fluidly negotiate the components of your transnational identity, how do you engage with these different sensibilities when you sit down to write a poem or work out the structure of a new manuscript?

TC: Anyone who has grown up in a household of dual language, dual identity, or a multi-cultural upbringing has probably always had the feeling of belonging to many different places, and as a result, the self is both multiplied and fractured. There were times in my youth when I felt this multinationalism was a burden or even an embarrassment. When I was a teenager, I wondered why I had to negotiate this intricate emotional terrain. I remember distinctly wanting to feel simpler, less complex, and less messy.

After college, I didn’t know what to do, so I boarded a plane to my mother’s homeland, Taiwan, to teach English as a Second Language. I thought I would do something useful with my time and help others. It turned out that my students helped me. As we conversed in English and Chinese and as we bounced from one language to the other, sometimes with great dexterity and at other times with tremendous awkwardness, I realized that this encapsulated how I felt my whole life. Sitting with my students, I saw a mirror image of myself. I saw their wish to learn English, to change themselves, in an effort to live out a dream.

I wondered why I had rejected this complex, awkward negotiation when they seemed so ready to embrace the relationship of self to self. In Of Gods & Strangers, I was excited for that discussion to play itself out. The traditional Empress Dowager is present throughout, but in one of the first poems of the book, “The Empress Dowager Boogies,” there is a gesture to combine tradition and contemporary life. Poems that focus on a traditional Chinese figure are placed side by side with poems such as, “Self-Portrait as an Imaginary DJ” or “Bitch Tree.” And, in this way, I am translating my contemporary Asian American experience. It is as audacious as it is filled with humility. Part disco, part Walled City, and I’m finally ready to own the totality of that experience.

LR: You have said that one of your goals as Brooklyn Poet Laureate is to make people feel included in the world of poetry. How do you think those of us in the poetry community can work to make poetry feel more accessible to American audiences?

TC: It took me a long time to come to poetry. In the ways that most people are educated in this artform, it can feel quite intimidating. I remember being asked by teachers, “What does this poem mean?” as opposed to the more important question, “How does this poem make you feel?” It was how poetry made me feel that led me to want to live inside it. As I educate my students now, we talk about poetry in terms that our mothers, fathers, brothers could understand. We talk about how an image or moment stirred us to remember something or asked us to ponder our own reactions to material.

As a poet laureate, I seek to be real about my approach to poetry. I am the first to admit when a poem feels hard to access or difficult to interpret. I am also very real about not having it all as a woman, mother, poet, educator. By grounding our work and ourselves, we make ourselves more approachable. We can speak about a poem in terms of what we can understand or access instead of what we cannot.

I have spontaneously recited or read poems to children as young as 4 or 5, who can immediately tell me what the poem meant to them. They are not afraid to interpret an image, a memory, or even an abstract string of words. There is a wild purity to them and poetry to me is a demonstration of that purity. How free, how happy poetry can be when seen through the eyes of those who have yet been untouched by judgment. How fun and ecstatic the moment is when art is embraced in the spirit in which it was made. Children remind me that poetry is not “hard.” It is just the opposite. Words are a celebration of the mind.

LR: Can you tell us what you’re working on now?

TC: I am working on a book of reimagined fairy tales and classic children’s stories. I spend most of my days reading to my children, and my imagination has taken hold of those stories and refashioned them. What I notice is there is always a form of danger at work in fairy tales. The figures of the wolf, fox, snake, witch, hunter are present in almost every children’s story in every culture. It’s as if these stories were made to warn as much as they [were made to] entertain or educate. In my poems the fairy tales are even more disturbing, as they call on the real dangers of contemporary life like war, disease, crime. Before I get too carried away in that direction, the poems also focus on the magic of the abiding love for one’s children. That is the greatest myth of all.

Some Offerings from Four Way Books' List

A Guest Post by Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University

Stephen H. Sohn

In thinking about the so-called state of contemporary Asian American poetry, I am most struck by the issue of the proliferation of small presses that have remained afloat through print-on-demand publication policies and through the strategic limited print-run system.  American poets of Asian descent have certainly been a beneficiary of this shift as evidenced by hundreds of poetry books that have been published within the last decade.  In 2008 alone, there were approximately 20 books of poetry written by Asian Americans, the majority of which were published by independent and university presses.  Of course, on the academic end, the vast majority of Asian American cultural critiques, especially book-length studies, have focused on narrative forms, but the last five years has seen a concerted emergence in monographs devoted (in part) to Asian American poetry, including but not limited to Xiaojing Zhou’s The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry (2006), Interventions into Modernist Cultures (2007) by Amie Elizabeth Parry, Race and the Avant-Garde by Timothy Yu (2008), and Apparations of of Asia by Josephine Nock-Hee Park (2008).  As a way to gesture toward and perhaps push more to consider the vast array of Asian American poetic offerings in light of this critical shift, I will be highlighting some relevant independent presses in some guest blog posts.  I have typically worked to include small press and university press offerings in my courses, having taught, for example, a range of works that include Sun Yun Shin’s Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press), Eric Gamalinda’s Amigo Warfare (WordTech Communications), Myung Mi Kim’s Commons (University of California Press), Timothy Liu’s For Dust Thou Art (Southern Illinois University Press).

In this post, though, I will briefly list and consider the poetry collections by American writers of Asian descent that have been put out by Four Way Books (New York City), headed by founding editor and director, Martha Rhodes—and will spend a little bit more time discussing Tina Chang’s Half-Lit Houses (2004) and Sandy Tseng’s Sediment (2009).   Currently, Four Way Books’ list is comprised of:

Tina Chang’s Half-Lit Houses (2004)

Pimone Triplett’s The Price of Light (2005)

C. Dale Young’s Second Person: Poems (2007)

Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s Shadow Mountain (2008)

Sandy Tseng’s Sediment (2009).

Were I to constellate the commonalities between these five collections, it would be clear that the editors at Four Way Books are very committed to the lyric approach to poetry, in which the connection between the “writer” and the lyric speaker seems more unified.  I have taught Pimone Triplett’s The Price of Light in the past, specifically for my introduction to Asian American literature course.  What I find most productive about this collection is its very focused attention on “lyrical issues” of the mixed-race subject.  In The Price of Light, one necessarily observes how distance from an ethnic identity obscures any simple claim to authenticity and nativity.  In The Price of Light, a lyric speaker returns to one vexing question: what does it mean to be Thai?  To answer this question, the reader is led through a unique odyssey, where issues of poetic form, tourism, and travel all coalesce into a rich lyric tapestry.

C. Dale Young’s The Second Person: Poems continues the exciting poetic trajectory envisioned in his first collection, The Day Underneath the Day.  I am especially energized by Young’s texturizing of the lyric landscape through the consideration of Caribbean geographies, ones that complicate the notion of the “American” in Asian American literature.  Further, the inclusion of medical vocabulary, no doubt influenced by Young’s work as a physician, uniquely stylizes his poetry, offering a heterogenenous semantic terrain that is breathtaking and wide-ranging.

Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s stunning debut, Shadow Mountain, reminds me of the importance of the “latency” affect that has structured the appearance of Japanese American literatures concerning the internment experience.  It is not unlike Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Beyond Heart Mountain in this regard, and the lyrical excavation important in contouring how the internment continues to reach across generations.

I’d also like to consider some specific poems from Chang’s Half-lit Houses and Tseng’s Sediment.  One of my favorite poems from Half-Lit Houses appears early on in the book; I reprint an excerpt here:

Invention

On an island, an open road
where an animal has been crushed
by something larger than itself.

It is mangled by four o’clock light, soul
sour-sweet, intestines flattened and raked
by the sun, eyes still savage.

This landscape of Taiwan looks like a body
black and blue.  On its coastline mussels have cracked
their faces on rocks, clouds collapse

onto tiny houses, and just now a monsoon has begun.
It reminds me of a story my father told me:
He once made the earth not in seven days

but in  one.  His steely joints wielded lava and water
and mercy in great ionic perfection.
He began the world, hammering the length

of trees, trees like a war of families,
trees which fumbled for grand gesture.
The world began in an explosion of fever and rain.

He said, Tina, your body came out floating.
I was born in the middle of monsoon season,
palm trees tearing the tin roofs.

Now as I wander to the center of the island
no one will speak to me.  My dialect left somewhere
in his pocket, in a nursery book (6).

This poem is largely instructive in the way that Chang continually subverts the nostalgic reclamation of family history and ethnic attachments.  The opening moves us into this framework with the graphic depiction of roadkill as a metaphor for the way that Taiwan itself might appear geographically, but we also know that this connection links itself back to the lyric speaker’s heritage.  The “Tina” of “Invention” is not born in the welcoming embrace of perfect weather, but in that of “monsoon season.”  It is no surprise then that her journey to Taiwan is itself replete with a sense of isolation, as “no one will speak to” her.  Tina’s father is posited as a laborer, but this force is one likened to “trees like a war of families,” and we begin to see the conflicts that will emerge throughout the rest of the collection.  For instance, in “Famine,” the readers are treated to a historically distant poem that situates the difficult conditions that structure the family lineage of the lyric speaker:

Famine
[Hunan, 1932]

Mother explains her love of heat
as she stirs over a burned pan.

We collect them one by one:
beetle, ant, june bug, roach, gnat, firefly.

The cow crumbles on its thin legs.
And the dust over a million eyes.

We let go of a handful.  Tiny black legs
spinning on a mound of sugar.

Let us eat, thankful for the small things
that wander by the window or a door.

We grasp what flits by us, flashing (35).

In this case, we recall the very difficult situation that reconstructs insects—not as some quaint local color—but as objects for consumption.   The lines here are indicative of Chang’s spare and direct lyrical style, which works at its best when disorienting the reader’s expectations.  I end my brief discussion of Chang’s Half-lit Houses with the intertextual lyric “shout-out” in “Stain,” where Agha Shahid Ali’s presence is made known.  I always find these moments fascinating because they point to a multiply inflected poetic teleology, where the influences of romantic poetry or American free verse must stand alongside Asian American poetry as its own specific subarea.  In “Stain,” reprinted below, the lyric speaker finds inspiration in an empathic connection to Ali’s poetry:

I read of Ali’s Kashmir, his country falling
beneath an elephant’s foot, the heaviness
that breaks the dry ground and the high cry
of an impending siren.  I want to tell everyone
of my alarm.  That I am afraid for them.
We must all admit what we fear in the lush
hazard of the waking heart, for what it wants
is to rest, a red flag hidden in uncertain
camouflage, to disappear inside a stupor fog (79).

Sandy Tseng’s Sediment is peculiar for the elliptical nature of its various poems.  Structurally, the first section mostly coheres around a themes of alienation and descent similar to the ones found in Chang’s Half-lit Houses.  As in Half-lit Houses, ethnicity never provides a direct mapping of identity and history:

Somewhere along the line,
a native entered the family
on my father’s side and left
his dark skin on us.

There are some things I’ve never asked

and always wanted to know.
The sound of rain tapping on tin
no longer soothes me to sleep.
We begin to adapt to our surroundings

but cannot give in completely.

It’s a task of finding
the right hole for the square peg
and not being able to fit it
perfectly into anything.

I imagine that my skin is not the color of fire.

When I am born, no one will fly me
across the ocean to raise me
in another country.  I imagine that
I am a round peg in a round hole.

The breath is being pushed out of my lungs

by the hands of something
unknown, the palms
pale as the sidewalks.
I imagine so many things (5).

Once again, the question of belonging surfaces through the oft-used metaphor, “the right hole for the square peg/ and not being able to fit it/ perfectly into anything” (5).  We are immediately led to think about the topic of miscegenation, as the opening lines tell us, “Somewhere along the line,/ a native entered the family/ on my father’s side and left/ his dark skin on us” (5), directing us again to descent and lineage.  Where does the lyric speaker belong?  Such questions continue to galvanize the poems’ openings.  Such is also the case with “From the First Generation.”

From the First Generation

The name I gave myself was altered by my parents’ accent.
The neighbors showed us how to spell it on a yellow notepad.

Our first Thanksgiving we cringed at the stuffed bird open and gaping
on the table.

We drank large glasses of milk everyday.  Our bones grew slender
and long, the height of a people increasing as our feet touched the land.

I have heard my mother come home late in the evening.  Some days
I could not wear the $40 sweater I begged her to buy.

There was a boy whose family hid in caves during the war, a man who
can still taste the C-rations he ate with a soldier.

We can never go back.  I’ve wanted to pack everything into a box, ship it
back overseas with a note explaining (9).

Here, the problematic of assimilation looms ominous over the immigrant family, where the child’s naming does not proceed seamlessly, and instead is “altered by” accent.  Perhaps, most salient to the recent holiday, Thanksgiving emerges as a day that constructs the immigrant family as other, where the object of consumption is “gaping,” rather than inviting.   Food therefore structures one way into the fabric of immigrant identity, where belonging might be accessed through ingesting appropriate dishes or drinks, but where one’s past cannot be escaped, as evidenced by the “man who/ can still taste the C-rations he ate with a soldier,” an ever present reminder that what one eats cannot be divorced from such complex culinary archaeologies.

In one of the most precise and crystalline poems from “Sediment,” Tseng’s “The Merchants Have Said It” recalls Chang’s “Invention” in exploring the way that a subject might find himself foreign to the very landscape with which he might claim an ethnic affiliation:

The Merchants Have Said It

In the courtyard, laundry dries in the aroma of fried fish
with a bit of garlic from someone’s fingers.  I hear
the voices from the alley.  The merchants have said it.
I am too tall.  Because somewhere I drank milk as a child.
And somewhere my face was not weathered
by Mongolian dust blowing from the north.  I hear the whispers
through the bed sheet curtains.  The way I hold my head
gives me away.  Although I cut my hair and buy clothes off the street,
still I walk like a foreigner.  My stride is too long, too quick.
But if I hide my fingernails and slouch, if I look no one in the eye,
someone will take the offered coins without a word (18).

There is the sense of the authentic local atmosphere, replete with the “aroma of dried fish” and the “voice from the alley.”  Even given her enterprising journey through this terrain, the lyric speaker has perhaps intruded, as she is still “like a foreigner.”  Interestingly, the poem ends on a note of shame, as the lyric speaker will not “look” anyone “in the eye,” so that any transactions might occur without challenging inquiries or the broaching of difficult topics.

In providing just a brief view into Four Way Books, my aim has simply been to highlight the exciting and innovative work being produced out of independent presses.  Of course, Four Way’s commitment to its poets continues, as Martha Rhodes has already contracted the future collections of C. Dale Young (Torn in 2011) and Monica Youn (Ignatz, April 2010), as well as the forthcoming collections of Tina Chang and Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan.

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Stephen H. Sohn is an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.
To find out more about Four Way Books, please visit their web site at www.fourwaybooks.com.