Your brother is lost, my mother says, because we didn’t believehim. He told us there was loud humming inside the walls—Go to sleep, we said.And he couldn’t couldn’t go to sleep. Yesterday, your father and I found dead bees inside the attic. Thousands.Once, when he was still alive, I found a dead bee on the windowsill of ourbathroom. Not thinking much of it I swept it into the trash with my palm, a motion captured in the dustlike afterimage. The next morning: a dead bee on the windowsill the other still in the bin.I told no one.
Misinformation
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- February 16, 2024
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Excerpted from ROOT FRACTURES by Diana Khoi Nguyen.
Copyright © 2024 by Diana Khoi Nguyen.
Reprinted with permission from Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller ICA. Nguyen is a MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, and a member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). She’s received an NEA fellowship and awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery contests. She teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
“In Root Fractures, we come face-to-face with a dark gravitational pull, the great black hole of war. Through the Vietnamese American experience, Diana Khoi Nguyen languages a feeling many of us can relate to, so often buried, silent and deep, within land, blood, bone, into molecular DNA. Yet because a black hole, deceptively, is not empty space, Nguyen tunnels through memories, photographs, family stories, death, grief, belonging and separation, motherland and mother tongue, relocation and empire—the points of entry and departure in those holes left in her siblings, parents, grandparents, and skyward to generations before. ‘A hole is a hole, but none of them are the same,’ Nguyen writes. Yet, she reminds us, there is a way out. As they ‘illuminate what once was broken,’ each of these poems glimmers and pulses along a pathway out—not for one person alone, but as enduring starlight, for generations to come.”
—Layli Long Soldier, author of Whereas
“When I say that Diana Khoi Nguyen’s work is deeply moving and unsettling, I mean that her words move and unsettle ideas about diaspora, identity, and loss in startling and gorgeous ways. I can’t get enough of this devastation.”
—Beth Nguyen, author of Owner of a Lonely Heart
“In Diana Khoi Nguyen's beautiful and heartbreaking book, Root Fractures, the leaping imagistic declarative sentence becomes fractured and unreliable, as a way to parse and thread memories and feelings. Stacked to the sky, the declaratives become tenuous and subjunctive, leaning under the weight of family, history, and trauma from displacement and a brother's suicide.”
—Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World and OBIT
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