Monthly Archives: July, 2023
In the Diaspora: July 2023
News from Vietnamese outside and inside Việt Nam►Vietnam to have first post-war resident papal representative►Supporters rally around Vietnamese American City Council member who was...
a lesbian ars poetica ~ a poem by Louie Leyson
Beautiful language is violent. I know this /
because it is with such art /
that Pedro Chirino, a 17th-century Jesuit, /
had once turned me from soft flesh /
into solid marble, or that rough trunk
Book Review: A Plucked Zither by Phuong T. Vuong
A Plucked Zither is a bold collection where Vuong presents an “anti-map” of herself and of the children of Vietnamese migrants.
Every Time We Ended in Little Sài Gòn ~ a poem by Phương Uyên Huỳnh Võ
There are more boba and coffee shops to work at /
all day like in Việt Nam - little stalls of street food little /
chairs to mimic sidewalk tables. The new phở shops /
all have names now, instead of numbers.
“Human tragedy, human compassion, and always human redemption”: A Conversation between Wayne Karlin and Khanh Ha
I don’t remember what or who drew my attention to the first book of Khanh Ha’s I read, Mrs. Rossi’s Dream, but I do...
Book Review: Bamboophobia by ko ko thett
To read ko ko thett’s Bamboophobia is to walk, crawl, and stumble through a grove bursting with the slipperiness of language and the absurd violence of forced nationalism: when an authoritarian government terrorizes peoples into conforming into their brand of national identity. And then suddenly, you find yourself in unexpected clearings: dark humor, chilling and deliberate absences of history, sets of self-translated parallel poems of Burmese and English otherwise ensconced among English texts. Bamboophobia is not merely a volume of poetry—it’s a state of being.