Becoming Ghost - by Cathy Linh Che (Paperback)

About the Book

"The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now"--

Book Synopsis

The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debut Split, Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che's parents' experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker's disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness.

Review Quotes

"Cathy Linh Che's Becoming Ghost is a new masterpiece of American love lyric, in the vein of Rita Dove's timeless Thomas and Beulah or Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic. Love: 'To misunderstand / each other, but to stick around.' Love: 'I mapped our escape.' Love: 'I knew you in your bowl cut, the red car in the driveway, the lens of your father's eye.' I'm getting goosebumps just typing. Che is a mighty poet, nimble across a variety of forms and voices, with a dazzling instinct for how one image, line, photograph, might illuminate the next. Becoming Ghost is an indelible reminder of all the people, known and unknown, who loved us enough to survive."
--Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr and Pilgrim Bell

"Cathy Linh Che's poetry vibrate with the rage and ache that accompany revisionist history work. The way she takes Coppola and the exploitative Apocalypse Now to task left me agape--these poems break the grammars of male and white-centric narratives."
--Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures

"Cathy Linh Che's Becoming Ghost magnifies how the golden shovel form both buries and unearths a poem's roots. Sentences unfold down Che's line breaks, generating shadow scripts and ghost dialogues in a language hidden 'like gold poured into a molar or cotton gauze stuffed into a cheek.' These poems reconcile myth and history, inheritance and upheaval, reconfiguring family memoir as a vehicle for empathy, experimentation, and recovery. Becoming Ghost is a marvel of form and spirit."
--Terrance Hayes, author of So To Speak and American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

"'Dance is a body's refusal/to die, ' writes Cathy Linh Che in this gorgeous and searing second collection of poems, the culmination of a long-anticipated multivalence project--one that vivifies her parent's experience being recruited as extras in the Coppola film Apocalypse Now. The poems in Becoming Ghost stun--they affirm and re-center those exiled from the rusted foundations of American mythology, they refuse to back away as they build new structures to reckon with not just our history but our present. These poems don't just sing: they break my heart and re-affirm life in the same long and glorious breath."
--Sally Wen Mao, author of The Kingdom of Surfaces and Ninetails

About the Author

Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Split, winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, An Asian American A to Z: A Children's Guide to Our History, and Becoming Ghost. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, and McSweeney's and she has received awards from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She currently lives in New York City.