36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

(Hardback)

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Fifteen years after his bestselling, award-winning collection of stories The Boat, Nam Le returns with an explosive and virtuosic debut book of poetry

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, says Le, a Vietnamese refugee in Australia, is the book I needed to write. The book Ive been writing my whole life. This book-length poem is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity, and the violence of an identity overwritten with racism, oppression and historical trauma. But it also addresses the violence in those assumptions of being always assumed to be outside ones home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this of language itself.

Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages, Les poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilising energy between the personal and political, honouring every convention of diasporic literature in a transcendent array of forms and registers before shattering the form itself. Like The Boat, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem conjures its own terms of engagement, escapes our traps, slips our certainties. As self-indicting as it is scathing, as hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.

From the opening lines, I knew this book would gut me. I wasnt wrong. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is an exhaustive examination of the complex stew of emotions every displaced person experiences. In Nam Les deft hands, deep scholarship is transformed into a nimble, nuanced romp, replete with devastating wit, sonic acrobatics, and superb mouth feel. Ive been waiting for this book all my diasporic life.
Barbara Tran, author of In the Mynah Birds Own Words

Author Bio

Nam Les poetry has been published in The Monthly,The Paris Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Bomb, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Lana Turner and Tin House. His short story collection The Boat received numerous major international awards, including the Australian Prime Ministers Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Boat has been republished as a modern classic and is widely translated, anthologised and taught. Nam Le lives in Melbourne.