Dear Diaspora is an unapologetic reckoning with history, memory, and grief.
Her work has appeared in Tin House , D ia gram , and other publications..
About author(s): Susan Nguyen received her MFA in poetry from Arizona State University.
Her work has appeared in Tin House , Diagram , and other publications.
Susan Nguyen received her MFA in poetry from Arizona State University.
In its deliberate interweaving of voices, Dear Diaspora explores Suzi\'s journey while bringing to light other incarnations of the refugee experience.
Suzi, caught between enjoying a rundown American adolescence and living with the inheritances of war, attempts to unravel her own inherited grief as she explores the multiplicities of identity and selfhood against the backdrop of the Vietnamese diaspora.
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora scrutinizes our turning away from the trauma of our past and our complicity in its erasure.
Through a collage of lyric, documentary, and epistolary poems, we follow Suzi as she untangles intergenerational grief and her father\'s disappearance while climbing trees to stare at the color green and wishing that she wore Lucy Liu\'s freckles.
The poems introduce us to Suzi: ripping her leg hairs out with duct tape, praying for ecstasy during Sunday mass, dreaming up a language for buried familial trauma and discovering that such a language may not exist.
Parting the weeds on a small American town, this collection sheds light on the intersections of girlhood and diaspora.
Dear Diaspora is an unapologetic reckoning with history, memory, and grief
