36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
Nam Le
Available as Hardback, eBook
An explosive, devastating debut poetry book from the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize
An explosive, devastating debut poetry book from the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity – and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression and historical trauma.
But it also means the violence of that assumption. 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 destabilizing energy between the personal and political. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.
“Exquisitely crafted fire bombs of incandescent rage. Moving and powerful”
Nick Cave
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“With a cool outsider’s eye, Nam Le takes the English language to pieces and reassembles it with a virtuoso ease not seen since Finnegans Wake. There is wit aplenty, of a dancing, ironic kind, but the fury and the bitterness that underlie 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem come without disguise, as do its moments of aching love and loss. Nam Le is a poet working at the height of his powers. Each of the poems comes with its own explosive charge; taken together, they are capable of shaking Western self-regard to its foundations”
J. M. Coetzee
“One of the most powerful and memorable debuts I’ve read in recent years”
guardian
“Each poem in 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem stings as if Nam Le burned syllables onto the page with a pyrographic pen. These poems seethe and sing; they restlessly shapeshift as Nam Le tries to find a mode of speech or form that could capture the violent history of war and the experience of deracination. But the English language stops short and he captures that gap – and the unspeakable realms of racialized consciousness – with virtuousic and ineffable beauty”
Cathy Park Hong
“Extraordinary”
art Review
Nam Le
Nam Le’s work encompasses fiction, non-fiction, poetry and screen. His poetry has been published in the Paris Review, Poetry, Granta, the American Poetry Review, Bomb, Conjunctions, Boston Review, The Monthly and other places. He has received major awards in Australia, America and Europe including the PEN/Malamud Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Until recently, he was the fiction editor of the Harvard Review. His short story collection The Boat has been republished as a modern classic and is widely anthologised, translated and taught. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.