36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

In his first international release since the award-winning 2008 short story collection The Boat, Vietnamese Australian author Le explores identity, language, generational trauma, and the many forms of violence in verse that’s pick-axe vivid and almost breathlessly propulsive. He opens by proclaiming, “Your violence dumbed me // Smeared me, reaved me— / Your war I don’t remember / And won’t let You forget.” Plunging into the consequences of colonialism, war, and emigration, he sharply addresses the burden of categorization (“they’d rather you be inscrutable than difficult”) and assimilation (“though not acceptance— / no amount of East–West fusion achieves that”), acknowledging that “whatever I write is / Vietnamese. I can never not.” Le is especially acute when talking about language, the tragedy of “our tongue blood-gutted”; English boasts “its mind of closed grids,” while Vietnamese entails “openness, manyness.” He uses the language of poetry to reflect on the language of a people, purveying the musicality of Vietnamese and the very physicality of its words being formed (“The mouth is the true / soul’s window”). In a final ambitious poem, he seems to embody a glacier, its flow gratefully omnivorous of life.