Ghost of - by Diana Khoi Nguyen (Paperback)

About the Book

Winner of the Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Prize

Book Synopsis

Ghost Of is a mourning song, not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space.

Ghost Of was selected by Terrance Hayes to win Omnidawn's Open Poetry Book Contest. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize.

Review Quotes

--Cole Swensen

"Ghost Of is truly a brilliant book. Amazing poetry happens inside visual innovations where '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.' Poetry is found in the gaps, silences and ruptures of history. In 'An Empty House Is a Debt, ' the poet writes: 'There is a house in me. It is empty. I empty it. / Negative space: the only native emptiness there is.' These poems mean to make a song of emptiness and the spaces we house. They sing to and for the ghosts of identity, exile, and history. They sing like a ghost who looks from the window or waits by the door. Lyric fills in the holes in the story. Ghost Of is unforgettable."
--Terrance Hayes "From the Foreword"

"Nguyen's Ghost Of is an astonishing scrapbook of lyric poems and photos where the central muse--her brother--is violently cut out. Poems are shaped into his silhouette as if Nguyen is trying to anatomize his tragic absence with pained and urgent remembrance. Nguyen writes with haunted precision and wondrous innovation. Ghost Of breaks my heart."--Cathy Park Hong

"Nguyen's Ghost Of is nothing short of an extraordinary debut. At its center is the haunting disappearance of a brother, gone by suicide. These poems are uncanny renderings of an invisibility made visible by the sheer will of candor, bemused forms, agility of lexicon, and a voice, almost noiselessly extravagant. What she gives us, she takes away; nearly impossible transformations transform. 'Something keeps not happening, ' she writes. And then she causes it to happen in a language of grief--bold and often colder than most daring, exquisite acts. Nguyen's voice is both wraithlike and astonishingly frontal; this is one of the most gifted first books I've read."--Lucie Brock-Broido

"A death creates both an absence--the hole left by the departed--and a presence--the weight of that hole. Nguyen's beautiful debut collection, Ghost Of, finds myriad ways to embody this seeming paradox. . . . The collection's story is ultimately not just of a sister's grief, but of a family's, of broad loss born from the Vietnam war and deep loss born from suicide. The book's wildly inventive forms show the power struggle anyone who has experienced great loss can understand: the attempt to find a suitable container for mourning, and the acceptance that mourning dictates the shape of everything around it."-- "RHINO"

About the Author

Born in Los Angeles, DIANA KHOI NGUYEN is a poet and multimedia artist whose work has appeared widely in literary journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, PEN America, and The Iowa Review, among others. She was a winner of the 92Y's Discovery / Boston Review 2017 Poetry Contest and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry.