Description
Book SynopsisA Plucked Zither explores what happens to language and thus emotions and relationships under conditions of migration, specifically refugee migration from Vietnam, and its aftermath. Crisscrossing between making a home in the U.S. and home in Vietnam, the speaker tries non-linear, multilingual voice(s) that demonstrates the disparate nature of memory and the operation of other ways of knowing. Efforts to speak reflect the severing created by historical forces of war and imperialism, while speaking makes connection possible and remains tied to that very history. Vuong leans on the anti-war Vietnamese singer and songwriter, Trịnh Công Sơn, for a poetic lineage on grief, longing, and justice. Rather than being sunken with loss, the speaker(s) move with it, leaping across gaps.
Trade Review"In this work of poetry, Vuong unbinds what gets lost while carrying the aftermath from Vietnamese voices that have been longing to breathe after the disruption from wars, migration, and silence. In other words, through the trajectory of these poems, Vuong’s speaker processes and dwells on the migrant’s emotional experience. These poems cross paths with images on how migration distances mothers from their children and how that separation creates not only a familial distance, but an origin distance from a migrant’s birth land." — Emily Velasquez, Soapberry Review
"A Plucked Zither is a bold collection where Vuong presents an "anti-map" of herself and of the children of Vietnamese migrants. Vuong's poems demonstrate how the shared experiences of the 1.5 and second generations of Vietnamese Americans continue to "make and remake" them—they are not so easily defined, whether by white America, their relatives, or in their personal turmoil to define their own relationship to Vietnam." —Cathy Duong, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network
"Poems like these are as two-sided as Vuong's title instrument: zither plucked and plucked, played upon and snatched away. For every touch of warmth and musicality, she admits something of the unknown or apparitional."
— Christopher Spaide, Poetry Foundation
