Reviewed by Corey Van Landingham
Ghost Of, by Diana Khoi Nguyen. Click to view catalog entry.
Location: Literatures & Languages New Books
Call Number: PS3614.G85 A6 2018
Ghost Of may be one of the most successful—and surely the most intriguing—recent books of elegy. Nguyen takes on the liminal spaces of grief after a brother’ suicide and translates them not only into the linguistic field of these poems, but also the visual. Included here are family photographs with the brother cut out, and the shape of that cutting pasted onto new pages, collage-like, where that void is populated with new language. And the book is unflinching in its approach to this sudden loss: “Let’s get on with it,” Nguyen writes in “I Keep Getting Things Wrong.” “When I return to that house, I eat the food / left out for my dead brother. I don’t waste much.” This is a remarkable debut collection from a deeply wise poet.
To learn more about Corey Van Landingham, please read her collection of poetry entitled Antidote.
Photo of author Diana Khoi Nguyen. Click to visit website.
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