![]() At its center is the haunting disappearance of a brother, gone by suicide. Terrance Hayes, Judge of the Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Contestĭiana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of is nothing short of an extraordinary debut. These poems sing to and for the ghosts of identity, history and culture they sing like a ghost who looks from the window or waits by the door. Let me tell you a story about seat belts.” Lyric fills in the holes in the stories. A mother and her dead son sit in the back seat of his car. In the title poem the poet writes, “Let me tell you a story about refugees. ![]() This collection is steeped in the poetics of exile and elegy. The images, like the poems, are intimate and unsettling they are hazy specters of cultural and personal identity. This is underscored in the series of altered photographs of the sort one might find in a family album. The story told here reads like a kind of dream memoir. The parts cut from the narrative become song while the remaining narrative becomes fragmented, half-remembered. The poet begins one passage with “framing, an act of enclosing, of closing off yourself from your environment and all the unintended sounds” and concludes this passage with “we fill in what bewilders us to fill what.” Thus the fragments and cutouts fill the void with music. Negative space: the only native emptiness there is.” These poems mean to make a song of emptiness, the spaces we house. The poem “Family Ties” asks, “What good does it do, this resemblance to nothing we know of the dollhouse” and later, in “An Empty House Is a Debt”: “There is a house in me. Or they look deeply into the interiors of family, a brother’s silhouette in the doorway. Other times the poems here look off to a father’s rooftop in Saigon. Sometimes it is as if these poems address the reflection of a ghost in a mirror. Poetry is found in the gaps, silences and ruptures of history. “There is nothing that is not music” for this poet. ![]() “There is nothing that is not music, the pouring of water from one receptacle into another a coat of bees draped over the sack of sugar caving in on itself ” Note this “relineated” passage from an imaginative poem entitled “Triptych”: Here too, amazing poetry happens inside the visual dynamics. They recall the work of Douglas Kearney or perhaps Tyehimba Jess’s Olio. Its textual innovations are immediately notable. ![]()
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