Dear Diaspora - (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry) by Susan Nguyen (Paperback)

About the Book

In these intimate and unapologetic poems, Susan Nguyen contends with history, memory, and grief while shedding light on the intersections of girlhood and the Vietnamese diaspora.

Book Synopsis

Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Association for Asian American Studies
New Mexico-Arizona Book Award Winner
Julie Suk Award Finalist

Dear Diaspora is an unapologetic reckoning with history, memory, and grief. Parting the weeds on a small American town, this collection sheds light on the intersections of girlhood and diaspora. 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. 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.

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. 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. In its deliberate interweaving of voices, Dear Diaspora explores Suzi's journey while bringing to light other incarnations of the refugee experience.

Review Quotes

"Susan Nguyen has a unique style in which she frequently separates words and phrases--not with punctuation or typical line breaks, but by using empty spaces. Her poetry collection is an all encompassing expression of history, memory, and longing as they come together in Suzi's mind. As with the best poetry, this collection is both enlightening and challenging."--Bill McCloud, VVA Veteran-- (12/13/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"Nguyen's poetry reveals a remarkable embrace of complexity while accounting for the difficulties of complicity, witness, and forgiveness. The final poem opens, 'I am learning how to hold grief/ in my mouth.' This powerful debut attests to that endeavor, and the way in which such work is necessary, beautiful, and full of complexity."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Dear Diaspora is a capacious and wholly felt account of a speaker's contending with place and memory. Susan Nguyen's gorgeous book maps out the longing of a particular Vietnamese immigrant experience--in its main character, the adolescent Suzi--and also captures, through its documentary research, a collection of voices of Vietnam War refugees in the aftermath. Against a backdrop of love and desire is the search to knit together a place of belonging and origin, rooted both in the sensual world and in the realm of the imagination. Dear Diaspora is a heartbreaking and breathtaking debut."--Cathy Linh Che, author of Split

"'Last night I had the American dream, ' Nguyen writes, puncturing the dream bubble in which 'America' exists as the only and inevitable state of success and belonging. In this collection, diaspora, specifically Vietnamese diaspora, is verdant and lush--suffused with green light, mustard greens, grass and trees--blooming through the drought of American love for Nguyen's speakers. The poems in Dear Diaspora offer us a lexicon we've needed to imagine how we might arrive at and receive one another better in land and language, in memory and touch."--Natalie Diaz, author of Postcolonial Love Poem

"Susan Nguyen, in Dear Diaspora, asks: 'At the center of your calamity, what grows?' Nguyen's gorgeously rendered poems answer that question with language and imagination. There's devastation in this book--an absent father figure, displacement of the speaker, a fragmented Vietnamese diaspora, but out of this devastation emerges beauty. The speaker in this book collects broken things such as cicada wings that become whole in her rich internal world. Nguyen's talent is palpable from the first line, and what a gift this book is. In her poem 'Grief as a Question, ' Nguyen writes: 'no one told me grief could be so ordinary.' But out of grief and woundedness emerges a voice that is anything but ordinary."--Victoria Chang, author of Obit

About the Author

Susan Nguyen received her MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Diagram, and other publications.