It was my pleasure to welcome Diana Khoi Nguyen to Wheaton for a reading last week. And I just thought to include my introduction here. Thanks so much to Diana! The students were absolutely enthralled by her presentation.
I have always been fascinated by poems that account for the enormity of their subject matter. An enormity that is based on many different factors. The enormity of the experience. The enormity of idea or concept that informs someone’s understanding of that experience. The enormity of people who share this type of experience with the poet. Not in the same way, as each person lives with their experiences in a way that is unique and difficult to describe. However, there is something common connecting the poet’s consideration of their experience and how others have come to understand their own experience. And there can be something revelatory in this connection.
To me, the obvious example is the love poem. That enormous emotion that takes over a person. Sometimes I wonder if there would even be poetry if it weren’t for love poems. Love is so unfathomable, which means there is always more to be fathomed. And then the miracle of poem that can account for each person experiencing love differently. It accounts for the poet’s singular experience of love and also the multiple ways people love other people.
And maybe the love poem is a slant approach to Diana Khoi Nguyen’s book Ghost Of. But, for my reading, the book is infused with the poet’s love for her brother. Her grief that he killed himself. What it means to have lived through that experience. And, importantly, how that grief, and the love motivating that grief, forces her to reckon with that tragic event. Again and again she reckons with it. What was the shape of her family? What is the shape of her family since the event? How to express the various silences that existed and keep existing among her family? Does the past change when she keeps looking back at it? Does rethinking the past change the past? These are some of the unfathomable questions for Nguyen.
And remarkably the poems are at ease living without concrete answers. Though they actively reach for something that might resemble an answer. And where or how to find these answers is, for me, where Nguyen’s remarkable work with collage and photography is most moving. It’s almost as though language isn’t enough. Just like her brother’s decision to cut his image out of family photographs doesn’t say enough, even as it says so much. And for me this is tragedy, grief, and love in poetry. Something that will never say everything you want it to, but it’s saying something. And that is truly something.
Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize and a Finalist for the National Book Award in 2019. Her work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and New England Review. She is a Kundiman fellow and a member of the Vietnamese diasporic artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). And she teaches in the creative writing program at University of Pittsburgh.