Six poets. Eighty-one poems. They offer more than just a view of the Vietnamese-American war seen from the inside: they are a slice, albeit a living slice, of Vietnam's culture and history enduring one of the most horrific and longest wars of the twentieth-century. They are, in a sense, to borrow a phrase from Philip Gambone, a long love poem to ... its people. For that reason it is more than a record of war: it's a record of human struggle in the face of extremity, of love, life, and death. There is in each of the poems an unmistakable quality of heart, a heart that has never failed to feel the deep pain of its fellow human beings. And it is that quality of heart--that deep pain--that gives the poets and their friends the abiding strength to struggle, to overcome, and to endure. --Nguyen Ba Chung.
Winner of the 2016 Whiting Award One of Publishers Weekly's "Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2016" One of Lit Hub's "10 must-read poetry collections for April" “Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. His poems are by turns graceful and wonderstruck. His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.”—The New Yorker "Night Sky with Exit Wounds establishes Vuong as a fierce new talent to be reckoned with...This book is a masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence."—Buzzfeed's "Most Exciting New Books of 2016" "This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level...A stunning introduction to a young poet who writes with both assurance and vulnerability. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world.”—2016 Whiting Award citation "Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the kind of book that soon becomes worn with love. You will want to crease every page to come back to it, to underline every other line because each word resonates with power."—LitHub "Vuong’s powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identity—all with a tremendous humanity."—Slate “In his impressive debut collection, Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, writes beauty into—and culls from—individual, familial, and historical traumas. Vuong exists as both observer and observed throughout the book as he explores deeply personal themes such as poverty, depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the various forms of violence inflicted on his family during the Vietnam War. Poems float and strike in equal measure as the poet strives to transform pain into clarity. Managing this balance becomes the crux of the collection, as when he writes, ‘Your father is only your father/ until one of you forgets. Like how the spine/ won’t remember its wings/ no matter how many times our knees/ kiss the pavement.’”—Publishers Weekly "What a treasure [Ocean Vuong] is to us. What a perfume he's crushed and rendered of his heart and soul. What a gift this book is."—Li-Young Lee Torso of Air Suppose you do change your life. & the body is more than a portion of night—sealed with bruises. Suppose you woke & found your shadow replaced by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful & gone. So you take the knife to the wall instead. You carve & carve until a coin of light appears & you get to look in, at last, on happiness. The eye staring back from the other side— waiting. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong attended Brooklyn College. He is the author of two chapbooks as well as a full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. A 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City, New York.
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Edited and translated from the Vietnamese by Linh Dinh. "Carefully selected for their literary significance as well as their antagonism towards state power, cultural orthodoxy and conventional wisdom, the hundred and sixty Vietnamese-language poems annotated, contextualized and expertly translated into English in THE DELUGE provide a stunningly original (counter) history-in-fragments of Vietnamese society from the 1960's up till today. While Linh Dinh is typically known for his extraordinary poetry, fiction and journalism, THE DELUGE showcases his remarkable talents as a translator, anthologist and cultural historian. I love everything about this book: the sneaky-smart selections, the illuminating yet ruthlessly efficient author-bios, the fascinating addendum and, of course, the absurdly brilliant translations." Peter Zinoman "In still-cratered Vietnam, apparently, things are even more screwed up for avant-garde poets than they were in the U.S. back in the 50s. Howl had its trial, but in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, non-conforming poets are just plain denied venues of publication. In fact, a whole generation of poets active in the South before 1975 has pretty much been erased from memory via State controls. At long last, some of them are brought forward here, along with many younger ones, absolute revelations in some cases, all of them examples of cultural courage. Not a little of poetry's history is about singular, strange and moving works getting written under conditions of proscription, censure, samizdat and exile. And there is plenty here of this kind. Ron Silliman is on to something when he keeps insisting the indomitable Linh Dinh should be our next Poet Laureate. Now Dinh's edited what is surely one of the major, startling anthologies to appear in the United States in this new century. Long live the insurgent poets of Vietnam." Kent Johnson"
He has organized the poems - which range from ancient to very recent works - around nine main themes that include Vietnamese views of society, responses to foreign influences, and feelings about such universal themes as relationships between men and women, the role of art in life, and conflicts among social classes.
2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY Hoa Nguyen’s latest collection is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” and comprises a verse biography on her mother, Diep Anh Nguyen, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. In turns lyrical and unsettling, her poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts.
When she befriends Christina, the new girl in school, Annie does not suspect that there is more to her than meets the eye and that Christina will have a huge impact on Annie's family and her oldest friends.
For anyone who has ever felt like they don't belong, Sigh, Gone shares an irreverent, funny, and moving tale of displacement and assimilation woven together with poignant themes from beloved works of classic literature. In 1975, during the fall of Saigon, Phuc Tran immigrates to America along with his family. By sheer chance they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life. In this coming-of-age memoir told through the themes of great books such as The Metamorphosis, The Scarlet Letter, The Iliad, and more, Tran navigates the push and pull of finding and accepting himself despite the challenges of immigration, feelings of isolation, and teenage rebellion, all while attempting to meet the rigid expectations set by his immigrant parents. Appealing to fans of coming-of-age memoirs such as Fresh Off the Boat, Running with Scissors, or tales of assimilation like Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Displaced and The Refugees, Sigh, Gone explores one man’s bewildering experiences of abuse, racism, and tragedy and reveals redemption and connection in books and punk rock. Against the hairspray-and-synthesizer backdrop of the ‘80s, he finds solace and kinship in the wisdom of classic literature, and in the subculture of punk rock, he finds affirmation and echoes of his disaffection. In his journey for self-discovery Tran ultimately finds refuge and inspiration in the art that shapes—and ultimately saves—him.
"Paper Bells is a striking, new collection by poet Phan Nhiên Hạo, depicting his American life as a Vietnamese refugee and exiled poet. Translated by poet Hai-Dang Phan, these poems are sorrowful, humorous, and unforgettable. A perfect introduction to the compelling work of Phan Nhiên Hạo, Paper Bells is a chronological selection that includes poems from his three collections published in Vietnam, poems written during his first years in the United States, as well as new poems published here for the first time"--
A bilingual anthology of lyric poem-songs from Vietnam's oral folk tradition, this revised edition includes new poems and an eloquent Introduction explicating poetry's importance in Vietnamese culture.
Simultaneously occupying past, present, and future, Black Stars escapes the confines of time and space, suffusing image with memory, abstraction with meaning, and darkness with abundant light. In these masterful translations, the poems sing out with the kind of wisdom that comes to those who have lived through war, traveled far, and seen a great deal. While the past may evoke village life and the present a postmodern urban world, the poems often exhibit a dual consciousness that allows the poet to reside in both at once. From the universe to the self, we see Lap’s landscapes grow wider before they focus: black stars receding to dark stairways, infinity giving way to now. Lap’s universe is boundless, yes, but also “just big enough / To have four directions / With just enough wind, rain, and trouble to last.”
