{"product_id":"dear-diaspora-9781496227904","title":"Dear Diaspora","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn these intimate and unapologetic poems, Susan Nguyen contends with history, memory, and grief while shedding light on the intersections of girlhood and the Vietnamese diaspora.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Nguyen’s poetry reveals a remarkable embrace of complexity while accounting for the difficulties of complicity, witness, and forgiveness. The final poem opens, ‘I am learning how to hold grief\/ in my mouth.’ This powerful debut attests to that endeavor, and the way in which such work is necessary, beautiful, and full of complexity.”—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003cbr\u003e\"Susan Nguyen has a unique style in which she frequently separates words and phrases—not with punctuation or typical line breaks, but by using empty spaces. Her poetry collection is an all encompassing expression of history, memory, and longing as they come together in Suzi's mind. As with the best poetry, this collection is both enlightening and challenging.\"—Bill McCloud, \u003ci\u003eVVA Veteran\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eDear Diaspora\u003c\/i\u003e is a capacious and wholly felt account of a speaker’s contending with place and memory. Susan Nguyen’s gorgeous book maps out the longing of a particular Vietnamese immigrant experience—in its main character, the adolescent Suzi—and also captures, through its documentary research, a collection of voices of Vietnam War refugees in the aftermath. Against a backdrop of love and desire is the search to knit together a place of belonging and origin, rooted both in the sensual world and in the realm of the imagination. \u003ci\u003eDear Diaspora\u003c\/i\u003e is a heartbreaking and breathtaking debut.”—Cathy Linh Che, author of \u003ci\u003eSplit\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Susan Nguyen, in \u003ci\u003eDear Diaspora\u003c\/i\u003e, asks: ‘At the center of your calamity, what grows?’ Nguyen’s gorgeously rendered poems answer that question with language and imagination. There’s devastation in this book—an absent father figure, displacement of the speaker, a fragmented Vietnamese diaspora, but out of this devastation emerges beauty. The speaker in this book collects broken things such as cicada wings that become whole in her rich internal world. Nguyen’s talent is palpable from the first line, and what a gift this book is. In her poem ‘Grief as a Question,’ Nguyen writes: ‘no one told me grief could be so ordinary.’ But out of grief and woundedness emerges a voice that is anything but ordinary.”—Victoria Chang, author of \u003ci\u003eObit\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“‘Last night I had the American dream,’ Nguyen writes, puncturing the dream bubble in which ‘America’ exists as the only and inevitable state of success and belonging. In this collection, diaspora, specifically Vietnamese diaspora, is verdant and lush—suffused with green light, mustard greens, grass and trees—blooming through the drought of American love for Nguyen’s speakers. The poems in \u003ci\u003eDear Diaspora\u003c\/i\u003e offer us a lexicon we’ve needed to imagine how we might arrive at and receive one another better in land and language, in memory and touch.”—Natalie Diaz, author of \u003ci\u003ePostcolonial Love Poem\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Body as a Series of Questions:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  ̉ ̉ ̉\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The First Language\u003cbr\u003e Suzi with an \u003ci\u003ei\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Suzi’s Mother Does Nails\u003cbr\u003e Letter to the Diaspora\u003cbr\u003e The Last Time She Saw Him\u003cbr\u003e Cicada Summer\u003cbr\u003e Beast Angel\u003cbr\u003e If I Say My Body Is Grieving\u003cbr\u003e Wish List\u003cbr\u003e Letter to the Diaspora\u003cbr\u003e You Google Vietnam\u003cbr\u003e Charlie’s Angels\u003cbr\u003e HAGS\u003cbr\u003e What Suzi Believes\u003cbr\u003e Grief as a Question:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  ̉ ̉ ̉\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The Boat People\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  ̉ ̉ ̉\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Smooth Jazz 105.9\u003cbr\u003e Ode to Hunger\u003cbr\u003e Dream of Double\u003cbr\u003e Letter to the Diaspora\u003cbr\u003e Suzi Doesn’t Miss Her Father\u003cbr\u003e You Google Vietnam\u003cbr\u003e Questions I’ve Never Asked My Father\u003cbr\u003e Suzi Grows Older\u003cbr\u003e Suzi Searches for Ecstasy\u003cbr\u003e Sitting Down with Grief\u003cbr\u003e Inventory\u003cbr\u003e She Doesn’t Know about the War Times\u003cbr\u003e Most Noble, Heroic, and Virgin Lady\u003cbr\u003e You Google Vietnam\u003cbr\u003e Letter to the Diaspora\u003cbr\u003e Suzi as a Series of Questions:\u003cbr\u003e In a Past Life\u003cbr\u003e Unending\u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments\u003cbr\u003e Source Acknowledgments","brand":"University of Nebraska Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49409237418327,"sku":"9781496227904","price":13.29,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/dear-diaspora-9781496227904","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}