Fifteen years after his bestselling, award-winning collection of stories The Boat, NAM LE returns to his great themes of identity and representation in a virtuosic debut book of poetry, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem.
ABOUT THE BOOK
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, says Le, a Vietnamese refugee to Australia, is ‘the book I need to write. The book I’ve been writing my whole life’. This book-length poem is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity and the violence of identity, embedded with racism, oppression and historical trauma. But it also addresses the violence in those assumptions – of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence, for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this, of language itself.
Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilising energy between the personal and political, honouring every convention of diasporic literature – in a virtuosic array of forms and registers – before shattering the form itself. Like The Boat, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem conjures its own terms of engagement, escapes our traps, slips our certainties. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.
[4. Aegic / All- encompassing]
You can’t go far wrong with violence.
You’ll go far, my boy.
You’ll cross oceans, my man.
Start with the Fall, go back or forth,
Through bombs or boats,
Across all the killing fields of thought.
You can’t make it up
Because it’s all yours – by blood.
By right. By wrong done to your blood.
Hold to trauma.
Even if it never happened to you.
You may claim it.
Your blood contains it.
What happened to them –
Your parents, theirs, all their kin –
Who don’t talk about it
Because of what happened to them –
Is yours to take and tell.
Their harm / your hurt.
You may write it. For it is written.
In the very walls of your cells.
This poem was previously published in the March/April 2023 issue of The American Poetry Review.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nam Le’s poetry has been published in The Monthly, The Paris Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Bomb, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Lana Turner and Tin House.
His short story collection The Boat received numerous major international awards, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Boat has been republished as a modern classic and is widely translated, anthologised and taught.
Nam Le lives in Melbourne.
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