"Vaan Nguyen’s electric poems of lust, longing, and detachment are both quintessentially Tel Aviv and entirely her own. Elegantly introduced and translated by Adriana X. Jacobs, this collection offers the English-language reader an essential window into the true and often surprisingly multilingual and multiethnic diversity of contemporary Israeli poetry—as it brings Nguyen’s linguistic journey from her family’s native Vietnamese to her native Hebrew all the way to the shores of English."
—Aviya Kushner

"In this explosively frank collection, Vaan Nguyen tunes her microscope to the textures and terrains of intimate spaces: between lovers and ex-lovers, travelers in lands both foreign and familiar, the individual self alone with a mind that can’t help but see the world through interstices. Here is a visionary moving along the edge of reality and its surreal offerings: where the flora and fauna of natural world intersects with the tensions of women and men. Only through a truffle eye, wounded or intact, can the world be revealed as 'A bubble / of dying butterflies,' 'A dick list / Wiped clean,' with 'A bat cutting across the sky / Underneath, a bourgeois enemy on a mattress.' Nguyen's speaker moves through these visions with bold vulnerability, as if the speaker is daring the world to make its next move. 'Look at me, I'm a routine,' Nguyen writes, and she’s right, though the truth is tongue-in-cheek: Nguyen’s lyrical routine is nothing short of exquisite, full of verve, full of nails."
—Diana Khoi Nguyen