Root Fractures

Root Fractures by Diana Khoi Nguyen is a collection of poetic courage. Nguyen’s first book, Ghost Of—a 2018 National Book Award finalist—explored her family’s silence after her brother’s suicide, utilizing photographs that her brother cut himself out of. She continues her examination of familial grief and pain, opening the aperture on her lens in Root Fracture. Her form evokes this dilation, tracing the fracture of her family from the fall of Saigon to their immigration to the U.S. from Vietnam to the poet’s complex whirlwind of a relationship with her mother. “Việt Cộng, Việt con, con viết. If I fail to use the right diacritics, I fail to say what I mean,” Nguyen writes, her word play and use of Vietnamese only bolstering the collection’s power.

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