Source: GBF
Paperback, 78 pgs.
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Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen, winner of The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, is almost a letter to those who have left their homeland in Vietnam. We begin with a flight in “The Body as a Series of Questions:” (pg. 1)
I was running fast because of what was behind me the bridge existed a few steps before me then disappeared through wooden slats rose the sound of rainwater I absorbed the sound until there was nothing else
Suzi is a young teen of immigrant parents who is living an American dream, but she observes the hardships of her parents. A mother who comes home from working, “hair limp, deflated like a paper bag” in “Suzi’s Mother Does Nails” (pg. 7) Suzi sees the hardships, but she also sees the disappearances. Her father is a man who still seems to be running in the jungles to the waterways searching for fish, for something, on little to no sleep.
In “Letter to the Diaspora” (pg. 14), the poet asks, “Does memory eat the body?” Memory can be an all consuming beast sometimes, as we recall those we’ve lost, the past that is marred by danger and fleeing. Sometimes memory can consume you so much that you “exist at the edges.”
Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen is a stunning debut that looks trauma in the eyes and dares it to consume us. It’s a navigation of one generation through the grief of another. “Grief says little: yes, no. Does not say where her father has gone, does not say how to speak the language of her mother.” (“Sitting Down With Grief,” pg. 49)
RATING: Cinquain
About the Poet:
Susan Nguyen‘s debut poetry collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in Sept 2021.
Nguyen’s poetry is often interested in the body: how geography, history, and trauma leave markers, both visible and invisible. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Tin House, Diagram, and elsewhere. She is an alum of Tin House Winter & Summer Workshops and Idyllwild Writers Week. Her hobbies, beyond reading and writing, include photography, zinemaking, hiking, and otherwise being outdoors.
Nguyen recieved her BA, English from Virginia Tech and her MFA, poetry from Arizona State University where she was the poetry editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review. She has taught creative writing at ASU and the National University of Singapore and she received a fellowship from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing to conduct an oral history project centered on the Vietnamese diaspora. She was named one of “three women poets to watch in 2018” by PBS NewsHour.
Follow her on Instagram.
