Dear Diaspora
eBook - PDF

Dear Diaspora

  1. 84 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Dear Diaspora

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. The Body as a Series of Questions:
  6. ̉ ̉ ̉
  7. The First Language
  8. Suzi with an i
  9. Suzi’s Mother Does Nails
  10. Letter to the Diaspora
  11. The Last Time She Saw Him
  12. Cicada Summer
  13. Beast Angel
  14. If I Say My Body Is Grieving
  15. Wish List
  16. Letter to the Diaspora
  17. You Google Vietnam
  18. Charlie’s Angels
  19. HAGS
  20. What Suzi Believes
  21. Grief as a Question:
  22. ̉ ̉ ̉
  23. The Boat People
  24. ̉ ̉ ̉
  25. Smooth Jazz 105.9
  26. Ode to Hunger
  27. Dream of Double
  28. Letter to the Diaspora
  29. Suzi Doesn’t Miss Her Father
  30. You Google Vietnam
  31. Questions I’ve Never Asked My Father
  32. Suzi Grows Older
  33. Suzi Searches for Ecstasy
  34. Sitting Down with Grief
  35. Inventory
  36. She Doesn’t Know about the War Times
  37. Most Noble, Heroic, and Virgin Lady
  38. You Google Vietnam
  39. Letter to the Diaspora
  40. Suzi as a Series of Questions:
  41. In a Past Life
  42. Unending
  43. Acknowledgments
  44. Source Acknowledgments