Reviews

Medicine can cure and kill. This dual notion is explored with care and a beauty that borders on the grotesque in Eric Tran’s 2022 poetry collection Mouth Sugar & Smoke.

Pop Song is a beautiful work of criticism as it is a memoir, with Pham’s articulation of doubt, fear, and her attempts at love so raw and poignant.

Alison Hồng Nguyễn Lihalakha’s Salted Plums holds up a mirror to the experience of Vietnamese people whose diaspora took a detour away from the common direct route to California. 

Reading Dream of Me as Water by David Ly is like falling down a rabbit hole and discovering vibrant color and vivid imagination in the depths. An almost Alice in Wonderland-like experience, the book opens the way a drop of ink blooms in water: centered, before it spreads out. From there, Ly takes us from dreamscape to dreamscape, each poem subtly suspending reality at the same time it is very much grounded in it.

Chinatown is humorous, critical, and surprisingly tender in its most powerful moments.

Vi Khi Nao’s Fish Carcass is a dynamic investigation of queerness, the body, and identity as told through bold and experimental poetic matter. I...