In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s second assortment of poems, the speaker is haunted by echoes of the previous that reverberate into the current, and by generational, particular person and collective traumas. In deft and stunning methods, the varieties of the poems work together with their content material, each shaping and breaking it.
The poems heart on the speaker’s interrogation of her reminiscence, which is inherently tied to a sample of displacement and disappearance in her household historical past, by her dad and mom’ emigration from Vietnam, Vietnam’s reform motion (Dổi Mới) and her childhood in California. Root Fractures begins in Vietnamese, and, as a non-speaker or reader of the language, I discovered myself drawn in, curious to see what I might uncover even in moments the place I used to be not the supposed viewers. The poems are deeply affecting. There’s a steadiness between fragmentation—each on the degree of particular person traces and of complete poems—and accumulative moments the place the fragments coalesce. Some poems are layered over pictures, some are minimize and rearranged, recalling how the speaker’s brother minimize himself out of household pictures earlier than ultimately taking his personal life. The areas left on the web page present pauses that make the phrases sing in new methods, whereas the repeated formal motifs create patterns for studying and meaning-making that mirror the speaker’s expertise of a want for wholeness and understanding that may’t be totally realized.
These are poems price returning to; every studying brings discoveries of new pathways of pressure and connection.
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