Primordial - by Mai Der Vang (Paperback)

About the Book

"Mai Der Vang's poetry-lyrically insistent and visually compelling-constitutes a groundbreaking investigation into the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants. Primordial is a crucial turn to the ecological and generational impact of violence, a powerful and rousing meditation on climate, origin, and fate. With profound and attentive care, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam. The saola looks like an antelope, with two long horns, and is related to wild cattle, though the saola has been placed in a genus of its own. Remarkably, the saola has only been known to the outside world since 1992, and sightings are so rare that it has now been more than a decade since the last known image of one was captured in a camera trap photo in 2013. Primordial examines the saola's relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival. Can a war-torn landscape and memory provide sanctuary, and what are the consequences for our climate, our origins, our ability to belong to a homeland? Written during a difficult pregnancy and postpartum period, Vang's poems are urgent stays against extinction"--

Book Synopsis

Mai Der Vang's poetry--lyrically insistent and visually compelling--constitutes a groundbreaking investigation into the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants. Primordial is a crucial turn to the ecological and generational impact of violence, a powerful and rousing meditation on climate, origin, and fate.

With profound and attentive care, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam. The saola looks like an antelope, with two long horns, and is related to wild cattle, though the saola has been placed in a genus of its own. Remarkably, the saola has only been known to the outside world since 1992, and sightings are so rare that it has now been more than a decade since the last known image of one was captured in a camera trap photo in 2013.

Primordial examines the saola's relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival. Can a war-torn landscape and memory provide sanctuary, and what are the consequences for our climate, our origins, our ability to belong to a homeland? Written during a difficult pregnancy and postpartum period, Vang's poems are urgent stays against extinction.

Review Quotes

"The insistent and formally experimental third collection from Vang turns her incisive poetic eye to the critically endangered saola--a bovine native to Laos and Vietnam--to explore themes of colonialism, war, and extinction. . . . An ambitious and impassioned contribution to contemporary poetry."--Publishers Weekly

"There's a way to set a line to remind a reader: poetry is incantation's medium. Mai Der Vang's Primordial, then, is a deep spell compendium composed of insistent repetition near graven in its gravity. As magic, her poems seek to order reality; diagrammatic maps of the material world (bodies, earth, boulders, sparrows, placentas, eggs, swords) suspend in primordial white space. As magic, her poems seek to transmute, and lexical weight becomes the airy syntax of 'how do politicians away, ' and stanza turns photograph. As magic, her poems seek to protect: here the saola, endangered ungulate hunted, haunted out the forests of Laos and Vietnam; here the Hmong, a people obscured by way of colonizing study and US military operations. In Primordial, Vang makes smoke out of LIGHT, planets with LANGUAGE, existence against erasure, and names from secrets, which is to say: this is remarkable poetry set to transfix."--Douglas Kearney, author of Sho

"A testament to the interconnectedness of life across species and generations, and to the power of spirit, Mai Der Vang's Primordial adapts the lyricism of her first book, Afterland, and the documentarian gaze of her previous book, Yellow Rain, to poetically present that which binds. Relational, vulnerable, and elegantly woven, Vang's poems animate the endangered saola alongside the resilience of the Hmong people, juxtaposing the origins of life with the legacies we leave behind. In its honoring of the vulnerability and strength of motherhood, this book is a reminder that our survival is intertwined with the natural world at large, and a call to protect both."--Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

"Another splendid triumph for the poet. . . . The collection delights in exploding known forms and creating new aesthetics as it considers what is environmentally human, animal, and landscape. Her language is focused and luscious, with never a word or a space out of place."--Poetry Northwest

"This collection is an abundance of beautiful language that is grounded and terrestrial, and at the same time, out of this world."--Angelica Flores, Newcity

"Vang draws poignant associations between the precarity faced by a creature on the verge of extinction and the plight of Hmong refugees seeking safety and identity. The result is an intimate collection that meditates on climate and survival both in the outdoor world and within the family."--Alta Journal

"In these highly original poems, and throughout Primordial, Vang unpacks the sentences that history writes--their unrelenting march, their obsessive truncation--to reveal a stunning, revelatory language of fragility, extinction, and ancestral origin."--Christopher Kondrich, The Washington Post

"Through resounding language and bold forms that explore what it means to exist and co-exist, to be threatened and to persist, Mai Der Vang creates a dreamscape in which time and space collapse and one experiences the past and the present, the personal and the external, within a single body."--Thảo Tô, Asian Review of Books

About the Author

Mai Der Vang is the author of two previous poetry books: Afterland, winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, and Yellow Rain, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.