Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art

(Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos--edición bilingüe español-inglés; bilingual edition, Spanish-English) click here.

      In her exquisite, recently published poetry and art book, Tango, Tangoing:  Poems & Art, the Vietnamese-American writer, visual artist, and Argentine tango dancer, Mong-Lan explores and exposes that most alluring, most magical of dances, the Tango.  Only a woman, and perhaps a woman who is neither Argentine, nor even of European background, could have approached tango, and those caught in its web, as does Mong-Lan in Tango, Tangoing.  With haunting words and elegant pen and ink drawings, Mong-Lan guides the reader into a dance world that touches upon Argentina's recent tragic history and that mingles leader and follower, love and heartbreak, all within the embrace and intricacies of the Tango.
      Readers of poetry, lovers of the dance, observers of the relationship between men and women, and those simply interested in Argentina will find Tango, Tangoing: Poetry & Art to be a captivating experience.  When Mong-Lan read—in Spanish translation—from Tango, Tangoing at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair in May 2008, the Argentine audience was stunned that a woman, and perhaps even more remarkably a non-Argentine, could write in such a manner about the tango and those who dance it in the clubs and streets of Buenos Aires.  As a veteran, very macho Argentine dancer in his 60s remarked, “In an earlier life, she must have been a great Argentine man dancer."   
      Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art is Mong-Lan's third full-length poetry book with her first, Song of the Cicadas, having won the Juniper Prize.  Tango, Tangoing is, however, her best effort, and its drawings and colors compliment perfectly Mong-Lan's poems.  A Spanish translation of Tango, Tangoing is expected to be published in Argentina in 2009.   

Fully illustrated, 132 pages of scintillating poetry and art.

English language edition
ISBN-10: 0615188001
ISBN-13: 978-0615188003
Valiant Press, 2008

Ask for it at your favorite bookstore, or go online and order directly from bookstores such as Amazon.com

From The Argentimes, May 2008, Buenos Aires:

“Tango, Tangoing is a sensual combination of tango, poetry and artwork. . . . [it] offers an astute and refreshing look at real tango.  So much is written and said about Argentine tango; here is a new and complete way to get to grips with more than just the steps and the music of this dance; the greatest of Argentine institutions. Read the full Review

From El Tangauta, June, 2008, Buenos Aires, translated from the Spanish:

“Mông-Lan manages to reproduce that suggestive and attractive atmosphere of the milonga but with quite unorthodox forms because she is innovative in both her meter and syntax as well as in the spatial positioning of the verses. Among the most original characteristics of the work are the drawings, with few but accurate lines of couples embracing that seem to be moving on the paper.
Read the full Review.

From TimeOut Buenos Aires:

“The latest publication from celebrated US poet and artist Mong-Lan, Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art, is a beautifully crafted collection of poetry and artwork, capturing the flavours of Argentinian tango through three sections of free verse interwoven with fluid pen and ink drawings."

What poets and critics are saying:

"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

"I have a way of thinking about the Mong-Lan enterprise. Tango is poetry, is a calligraphy of the body, a series of movements and freeze-frames also suggested by the dispersed lineation of the poem on the page. So that a linear equivalent of ochos, backward and forward steps, and voleos can be discerned in the arrangement of the lines. I know that Pollock thought of his 'Action Painting' as a kind of dance, and films of him at work show him jumping about and waving his arms in an agile way. To succeed at calligraphy you must practice over and over until the arm and hand move without hesitation, instinctively. And it is the same with the dance. This is work that is inseparable from virtuosity. It's instructive, too, that she places Porteño tango in a context of poverty and melancholy. The dance becomes a kind of pain-killer, helping participants forget all that is irreparably sad about their lives. Obviously it has a relationship to love and sex, too, but not a direct correspondence, since you can have great partners for the dance that you don't see elsewhere. It is an abstraction of love/sex. An impressive performance."--Alfred Corn

Pen & Ink Drawings from Tango, Tangoing: