The 20th anniversary edition of a groundbreaking Asian-American queer classic by celebrated author Justin Chin.

Floating somewhere between fiction and memoir, Burden of Ashes is a beautiful and brutal series of short stories in which childhood, homeland, and lovers both real and imagined succumb to whimsy, revision, denial, and truthful embellishment. Within these pages, Chin artfully creates a personal world where snake killings, demonic possession, the enigmatic pleasure of a deep kiss, cruelty, and compassion all co-exist. Actual events and fictional outcomes reconcile what has been lost, outgrown, and abandoned with what never was and what might have been.

With foreword by Alexander Chee.

Justin Chin (1969-2015) was born in Malaysia, raised and educated in Singapore, shipped to the U.S. by way of Hawaii, and resided in San Francisco until his passing. Among other accomplishments, he was the author of seven books, including Gutted (2006), winner of the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award for Poetry.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. A contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewaneee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of multiple awards and honors. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Fiercely devoted to the margins of life in the generation after the devastating first wave of the AIDS epidemic, this cathartic collection of poems explores illness, travel, contagion, the meaning of home, identity, tainted purity, and the bits of life that contain them and hold them together in spite of the harsh exigency of daily life. In more than 40 pieces, Chin fearlessly delivers everything from his first exposure to science (Magnified) to a mail order fantasy experience (I Buy Sea Monkeys); from backroads travel in Asia (Little Everest in Your Palm) to the plight of immigrants in America (The Men's Restroom at the INS Building). Chin's brutal honesty and sharp humor frame a profound and original collection.

Justin Chin is the author of two collections of poetry, Harmless Medicine and Bite Hard (Manic D Press), and two collections of essays, Burden of Ashes (Alyson Press) and Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks (St. Martin's Press). In the 1990's, as a performance artist, he created several performance works that were presented nationally and abroad.

The first collection by award-winning performance artist/poet Justin Chin. In Bite Hard, Chin explores his identity as an Asian, a gay man, an artist, and a lover. He rails against both his own life experiences and society's limitations and stereotypes with scathing humor, bare-bones honesty, and unblinking detail. Whether addressing "what really goes on in the kitchen of Chinese restaurants" or a series of ex-boyfriends, all named Michael, Chin displays his remarkable emotional range and voice as a poet. His raw, incantatory, stream-of-consciousness poems confront issues of race, desire, and loss with a compelling urgency that reflects his work as in performance, speaking directly to an audience. Throughout this collection, Chin demonstrates his uncanny ability to convey thought-provoking viewpoints on a variety of controversial subjects.