Dear Diaspora

The first poem of Nguyen's powerful debut asks: "At the center of your calamity, what grows?" That question serves as an entry point for poems that interweave grief, exodus, and girlhood... Nguyen's poetry reveals a remarkable embrace of complexity while accounting for the difficulties of complicity, witness, and forgiveness.

* Starred Review *

The collection asks very early, “Do you feel safe wrecking language?” and continues to decipher girlhood, familial trauma, and otherness through that lens. Through the epistolary title poems, the poet builds kinship with other members of the diaspora in the background of an engulfing whiteness. She asks what it means to live with the inheritance of grief and trauma while the past continues to haunt the present. And the abrasions of the present, in the form of racial violence, speak directly to the Vietnamese-American experience... Nguyen, through her adept use of repetition and parsing prose poems in intervals, allows her poems to call to each other...

-- Gauri Awasthi * The Rumpus *

Where is the beginning and where is the end — of memory? of grief? of youth? Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora explores these questions by leading us through a girlhood steeped in loss and longing. In a series of interconnected poems that read like a kaleidoscope of memories, Nguyen’s protagonist Suzi grapples with finding her place in the Vietnamese diaspora after the loss of her father. She makes lists of questions, conducts Google searches, and writes letters to the diaspora. In this excavation of her past and present, Suzi steps from the greenness of childhood into a new awareness of who she is.

-- Thuy Phan * Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network *

Nguyen deftly moves through anaphora, questions (“Can you list the responsibilities of a needle? When did you lose the color green?”), epistolary, prose poem, and documentary poetry forms, chronicling girlhood, family history, a father’s disappearance, and the lives of Vietnam War refugees. I’m drawn to the expanse of these poems, how they move across the page, their candor and admissions, the conversations and the asking—to attend to what one doesn’t know and can’t know between the generations in the Vietnamese immigrant community (“My mother said: Our country no longer exists”). These attentive poems are vivid in their grief, wonder, play, and insistence on memory and imagination (“how to speak about language where there is no language . . . I am 2 parts fish sauce / 1 part lime juice sugar dissolving / a wet match”).

-- Shelley Wong * The Poet’s Nightstand with Shelley Wo