Reviews

Zuihitsu, “lists built to cause surprise through a mix of surprise and variety,” are the cornerstone of Vi Khi Nao’s latest poetry collection My Yellow Heart. Prefaced by a copy of a blast email sent towards the end of March 2022, the collection is framed as an elongated response to a prompt. The email’s sender is Erik Ehn, who asks the recipients to practice in zuihitsu, “compassionate noting” for two weeks following the theme of “changed-for-changing.” The poetry collection follows suit, immediately creating a narrative through numbered lists, with the first half of poems titled with dates, as if in response to the prompt. 

Tender Machines, J. Mae Barizo’s second full-length poetry collection, begins with the epigraph from Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar that tenderness is what women see in other women that they don’t see in a man. This book is for women, in all their roles and royalties—daughter, friend, lover, mother, great-grandmother.

A Plucked Zither is a bold collection where Vuong presents an “anti-map” of herself and of the children of Vietnamese migrants.

To read ko ko thett’s Bamboophobia is to walk, crawl, and stumble through a grove bursting with the slipperiness of language and the absurd violence of forced nationalism: when an authoritarian government terrorizes peoples into conforming into their brand of national identity. And then suddenly, you find yourself in unexpected clearings: dark humor, chilling and deliberate absences of history, sets of self-translated parallel poems of Burmese and English otherwise ensconced among English texts. Bamboophobia is not merely a volume of poetry—it’s a state of being. 

In Banyan Moon, Thao Thai’s debut novel, three generations of women find their way home, from southern Vietnam’s incendiary tropical heat to the claustrophobic innards of a vast gothic mansion on Florida’s swampland coast.

In 2016, an Amerasian man named Phong sits at the American consulate in Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam, and waits with bated breath for a visa approval that never comes