Description
Winner of the Omnidawn 2016/17 Open Poetry Book Prize
Selected by Terrance Hayes
Ghost Of elegizes a brother lost via suicide, is a mourning song for the idea of family, a family haunted by ghosts of war, trauma, and history. Nguyen’s debut is not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: remnants of memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space. Through lyric meditation, Nguyen seeks to bridge the realms of the living with the dead, the past with the present. These poems are checkpoints at the border of a mind, with arms outstretched in bold tenderness.
Long-list nominee for the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry
Ghost of by Diana Khoi Nguyen wrestles with what remains in the wake of a death in the family. Nguyen’s work is neither an exorcism nor an unhaunting, but a mourning song that reaches across time, space, and distance toward loved ones, ancestors, and strangers.
Alex Crowley, Publisher’s Weekly Spring 2018 Announcements
In her innovative debut, Nguyen documents an immigrant family grappling with a son and brother lost to suicide. The opening poem sets the stakes, noting that “There is no ecologically safe way to mourn.” Poems alternate between lyric fragments that are scattered across the page, akin to “ashes into the sea,” and altered family photographs that operate as testimony and generative force. . . . Though devastating, Nguyen’s impressive lyrico-visual rendering details survival despite overwhelming tragedy.
Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen suspends itself between elegy and séance. These poems shove us into the stomach of grief as they re-embody the deceased—Nguyen’s own younger brother—whose absence is a tangible presence “dangerously close to living.” She intricately braids family, fantasy, and nature into a spellbinding witness to grief and the ghosts that carry it. Forms shapeshift from tidy to scattered, their language oscillating between lucid and slippery, as Nguyen shows the process of mourning for what it is: a hurtling, frenetic heartache and a desperate search for logic.
Caroline New, Michigan Quarterly Review
Ghost Of is a book of stunning verse and innovative visual constructions. Poems become mirrors, wedges, eels, fish in a pond, and Gyotaku that Nguyen pairs with snapshot photos from her childhood. This is a collection about leaving, about absence—a mother fleeing Vietnam, an infant, “two minutes after [she] was born,” already making her “first evacuation,” and, most of all, a brother leaving emptiness behind him in death. . . . Here’s a world where poetry is what comes into the gaps, what fills the voids, where poetry might fill what grief leaves behind.
Nguyen’s shape-shifting poems confront death, displacement, and the emptiness within and around us. In “An Empty House Is a Debt,” she explores this “negative space” with remarkable precision: “This craving carves a cave.” In “The Exodus,” Nguyen traces trauma and its heirs from Saigon to Los Angeles: “And if you bypassed a war, a war / wouldn’t bypass you.”
Briana Shemroske, Booklist
In any great poetry, the white space is as inflected as the text, and [in Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection Ghost Of ] the white space is so inflected it seems to vibrate. Some poems are arranged tidily, corralled into numbered sections, while others careen across the page. In the former, the white space often reads as a white-knuckled attempt to contain sorrow. In the latter, the white space feels as unpredictable as sorrow itself. The blank page here is where we sense ghosts: a distinct presence that is empty, an embodied form of nothingness.
Jess Smith, Kenyon Review
One might say the text is interrupted and, in being forced to work around an absence, innovate… the reward is a highly musical, often wrenching experience… Sense remains symbiotic with sound here, and Nguyen’s poems become uniquely accessible and emotive in their materiality… The obsessive nature of mourning (however brief or prolonged) ensures such linguistic, sonic, visual, conceptual, and emotional reworking… Nguyen in radical, formal contortions of language and clear-eyed lyricism seeks to animate the elegized and—like the dead and the world—rise, unravel her marvel, and start up again. I’m eager to see where she goes next.
Daniel Moysaenko, The Volta
In her haunting and visually inventive debut collection Ghost of, Diana Khoi Nguyen invents such forms to contain the uncontainable and to fill the irremediable gaps left by suicide…The nightmares of the things her mother had to do to survive after the fall of Saigon form another absence, another set of gaps filled both by imagination and reportage… Brutal and beautiful, Ghost of reverses erasure in reverberant images and language that, in turn, haunt its reader.
Amaranth Borsuk, Lana Turner
Diana Khoi Nguyen’s poetry collection Ghost Of is a haunting exploration of grief’s aftermath, for a sister and for a family. Musical, visual, personal, and cultural, Ghost Of interrogates loss through a symbiotic relationship between verse, poetic form, and the materiality of the book… Her lyric and ecological metaphors begin us on a haunting, visual journey through loss, the seen, and the unseen… With the risks involved in mourning, we must carve a space to grieve, and Nguyen does so pointedly, with the poems’ speaker going where loved ones traditionally refuse.
Phuong T. Vuong, TIMBER
This work at times interrogates, at times unsettles, at times heals; always, it compels. Like the “elver” that Nguyen invokes, it is a thing that swims into one’s consciousness and invites the reader to question their own losses, their “ghosts of,” their own blank, in-between spaces, and their (un)belonging and exile… Ghost Of is this evocative and this personal. It is not a casual or academic read but a living entity, a painful yet restorative conversation… Read Ghost Of. Experience it. Listen. See.
Paul Bonnell, diaCRITICS
The search for identity, and the acclimation to a culture of a new country, Nguyen so confidently writes in a style and voice that is as innovative as it is maturely aware of its subjects and themes… The beauty of these poems lies in the seemingly chaotic nature they take as the collection progresses. By the fourth “Triptych,” the photograph is altered to the point of nausea, and the fragmented poem that follows singles out the speaker’s brother, Oliver, as a figure so far removed from anything that resembles that serene family in the photo before.
Esteban Rodriguez, Pank Magazine
The collection moves back and forth between some very sharp lyrics to poems carved out of lyric via erasure . . . Nguyen’s Ghost Of is an incredible exploratory series of lyrics, meditations and visuals on family, memory, loss and being, managing to be breathtaking, heartbreaking and even playful, attempting to write both the loss and the absence, physically carved out of and into the page. And the ghosts in this collection are plenty, as are the dislocations: from that of the author’s late brother, to the ghosts that come from her family’s emigration from Saigon to California.
Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of embodies Virgo’s careful attention to detail in an exquisite enumeration of all the possible nuances of absence, Virgo’s ability to examine the quality of erasure and loss, the shapes left behind by the missing being. Nguyen’s poems range themselves around this space literally and linearly, from the cutouts of photos of the lost brother to the words that assemble to occupy (but never fill) that same space. . . . “Gyotaku,” is stamped upon each of the three sections as well, and this word is the Japanese technique of printing fish, conceived to immortalize a catch, a way to immortalize the dead . . . and this is what Nguyen’s book seems to be building, such a lasting monument to this lost body, the poems named for gyotaku colliding and assembling images of the shape of a body that once moved, swam, lived.
Genève Chao Real Chaos Astrology Review, Anomaly
Reviews
About the Author
Interviews
Excerpt
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018), which was selected by Terrance Hayes. In addition to winning the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she currently teaching in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and will be an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh starting in the fall 2020.
An interview with Diana Khoi Nguyen
(conducted by Ayesha Raees for The Margins)
Ayesha Raees: What does form mean to you?
Diana Khoi Nguyen: I believe in constraint. As both a practicing writer and as an educator, I believe constraint can yield something that might not have been said otherwise. Something about having to work within confines allows for a different kind of language, subject, or something more unexpected to emerge.
At the same time, though, I don’t think in constraint all the time, and neither do I always write in it. Through the forms in Ghost Of, especially in the poems “Triptych” and “Gyotaku,” I am working with grief, death, and family trauma to a cryptic degree. My grieving wasn’t a form I went on looking for. It became an artifact that became available to me. This artifact had a really terrible power, yet I wanted it. One night, I just didn’t know what to do. I sat staring at my family’s photographs, and I decided that rather than just sit there and feel awful, I should try to fill in the space left behind by Oliver.
AR: Apart from your hybrid visual poems, I want to expand on the non-visual yet still unconventional form you chose to write in. Your poems “A Bird in Chile, and Elsewhere” and “The Birdhouse in the Jungle” stand out in regards of enjambements and caesuras. Your poem “An Empty House is a Debt” is a list. In light of such poems, how do you approach questions of form and context? What comes first to you?
DKN: In general, I get bored pretty easily, and that’s my starting point. I begin every poem I write quite organically. And I don’t edit the poem afterwards to a large degree—it is how you see it as a reader. For me, it has a lot to do with intuition—move that line over there, decide to keep this one here. I write in such a short amount of time but when I am writing each piece, I write it very slowly. I write one line and then I sit there for a while. I think about it. Then I write the next line, and then go back to the first line, and so on.
AR: It’s almost like editing on the spot.
DKN: Quite so! Later on, I don’t actually have to revise very much because I’ve gone over the “field,” the page, so many times. There are, of course, little bits of edits here and there, especially with pieces I just can’t figure out what to do with, and then I will return to them months later. This is what my process has evolved into now. The poem comes out really slowly. It’s almost like hand-embroidered work. You put each bead down and then you have to make sure that the next bead is going in the correct place. If you mess up, you have to go back. You have to undo everything, you have to redo that first bead or that first stitch.
I used the word “field” for the page because I really love that kind of open field that words and lines can move across. It was intentional for me to include and incorporate multiple forms in the book. Not only because I write in different forms but I didn’t want the book to be just one thing. I wanted the book to hold different kinds of facets. I wanted different kinds of visuals. In an open “field,” I wanted different kinds of lineation to my contextual voice.
AR: The book is not “One Thing” and this shows in its arrangement as well. You divided the book into three sections, opening with a visual hybrid poem, a silhouette of your brother with his name written in the background, followed by—only in comparison—a more traditional poem “A Bird in Chile, and Elsewhere.” How did you end up making the choice to open the collection with these two vastly different poems, as well as to have three sections in Ghost Of?
DKN: When I was trying to order the book, I didn’t want something linear. I organized the poems in piles. The “Triptych[s]” were in one pile. The “Gyotaku[s]” were in another pile. There was a series which I mostly ended up cutting out from the book. Most of the poems belonged to different kinds of categories. They were about my parents or Oliver or myself and so on.
As I have worked with textiles before, a lot of my process is fetched in respect to that world. I weave a lot, and just like with weaving, I took the different poetic strands and I began to put them together. It was really fun to pick a strand to begin with. I wanted to start at the end, which means I wanted to start with my brother’s death.
That’s how “A Bird in Chile, and Elsewhere” functions. I love the idea of a little proem that begins and sets the tone of the book, like that one single note played before the rest of the orchestra. “A Bird in Chile, and Elsewhere” has that soundlessness which eases from what is before it: the silhouette poem which, ultimately, represents the Ghost.
Even though the book is dedicated to both of my siblings, I wanted to give a special ode to the presence of the Ghost. Of course he is there throughout the book, but to also have his presence and his absence at once on that single page was my intention. Oliver’s name printed in gray across the whole page almost reflects those old library books which, when you open their covers, have a watermark of the publisher. I wanted him to lead the reader into what the book contains. I liked thinking about him as part of a fiber of both the page as well as, ultimately, the book.
I think about weaving where the material is natural and organic, where the material isn’t just an object but also a subject. That’s the nature of how I began and after that, I layered my writing in pieces. I wanted things to build slowly and evenly.
The three sections were really deliberate—there were three siblings. It’s not like the sections are about each of us siblings, but I like this trinity that the number three gives me. It’s a prime number. It’s uneven. Yet, also stable. It makes me think about a stool, about how it doesn’t have two legs. A stool with two legs is more likely to fall over than a stool with three legs. I like to think of the number three as an essential number of stability. The family is now unstable because one of the children is gone.
In respect to contests, book prizes, and just generally preparing a manuscript: one is advised to put the best poems toward the beginning of not just the book but in front of every section. I wanted every part of the book to be engaging and this is why the book is so short. It has been around eight years since my MFA, therefore, I have had many, many, many, many years of poems. I pared everything down to allow for the pieces that I wanted to be in that book to fully have their moment. I’ve read so many books that are wonderful but they’re 100 pages long. I don’t remember the 37th poem but I do remember the last poem or the first poem.
The poem “Ghost Of” feels like a kind of a dizzying climax. Even though it is an end, it is also a present, yet so much has happened in between in terms of the past, my parents’ past, and all the possibilities of an alternate present where my brother believingly exists now, which is also a nowhere. I wanted to weave all of that together.
AR: Not only your writing but also the way you reflect on your process is so intriguingly systematic. It seems to fetch from a strong intentionality to write in two sets of dedicated time: 15 days in the summer and 15 days in the winter. I wonder how the winter and the summer seasons influence your writing? Is the landscape or environment in which you have chosen to spent those 15 days also the same every season? What other aspects influence your process?
DKN: I write in the summer and winter because that is the only time I am not teaching and I am free. In December I’m usually at home. December is especially difficult because that’s the month that my brother committed suicide, and it’s important for me to be in a safe and familiar space which is at home, surrounded by people I care about. I don’t feel like the season affects my writing as much as the significance of time. My brother’s death anniversary leaves me fragile in that moment.
In the summer, though, because of the temperature, I feel more playful. I think it’s hard to feel playful when you’re cold, but even though there is a kind of playfulness in the summer, my writing doesn’t change too much. What’s nice about the summer is that I’m often in a different place. One summer, I wrote in Taos, New Mexico and this past summer, I was around the Washington coast. Two Decembers ago, though, for the first time, I didn’t write from my usual home but from Vietnam. It was quite a different experience and I felt totally disoriented.
The thing that affects my writing practice the most is that I don’t write alone. I usually write with a few different friends who all live in different parts of the country. They’re also writing every day for 15 days. We check in with each other to make sure that we did it because if you’re just by yourself, you might not end up committing to your goal. It’s just nice to know that you’re not alone in this grueling writing marathon because it can be so hard to try to write a poem every day. What my community provides for me influences me significantly in my writing because I will start noticing how our work begins to correspond with each other—sometimes we would all write about birds or something. When you’re in sync with a person, simultaneous things emerge. You get to know each other’s work in a raw, vulnerable way and their writer-DNA starts corresponding with your writer-DNA. I don’t feel like I have adapted their style, but their voice and their obsessions are in my mind, and in an intense period of creating, you begin to draw from everything that’s in your mind.
The environment has stayed consistent as I’ve been doing it with the same group of writers. Every now and then, I’ll add a new person but this process is not for everybody. I have one friend from my MFA, she’s been doing it with me for six years. There’s something about the intensity of that period that produces interesting significant work. If you aim for 15 poems, you might end up with seven that can be used. That’s seven more than what you had before you started.
Ghost Of was written only in 30 days, in August and December 2016. The book was picked up the following year in March and then it came out a year later.
AR: As an educator in a college that is predominantly upper-class and white, do you practice any techniques that allow for an inclusive environment for those who are already feeling racially, or otherwise, Othered?
DKN: In my creative writing workshops, I bring in diverse readings, many different voices from many different places. When it comes to teaching, it’s not just about my aesthetic or even my agenda. I don’t want my students to try to figure out what I like and then cater to me. I had so many teachers in my MFA who just wanted me to write their kind of poems. I didn’t find it helpful. It took me three or so years after my MFA to break away from it. As an educator I just want people to find the thing that’s most exciting for them. I want to facilitate their findings.
I’m working now on a different model for a workshop. I don’t like the Iowa model. The Iowa model comes from a very specific white government military structure, which is of investigation. It comes from a CIA operative where the ‘writer’ is ‘gagged.’ They can’t speak while everybody around them talks and critiques. There’s just so many things wrong with this. I was chatting with another writer who teaches at Virginia Tech and she did a class where they workshopped different types of workshops. They came up with 20 different kinds of workshop models and in one of them you can only ask questions that are very specific to your writing. I love that. When each person is up for workshop, they choose the model that they want. It’s a consensual way of moving forward. The Iowa model isn’t always consensual. I think about these things actively in my classes at Randolph. It is a place where I feel I can really be me, where I can feel free to be inclusive and talk about inclusivity. I don’t want to partake or recreate the institutions I’ve been a part of as a student.
AR: Would you like to share any words of encouragement to both emerging writers as well as to students of color who are only exposed to a writing world that might not be nurturing them? What can they do in their current situations to help themselves as well as help others in a similar situation?
DKN: This is a hard question but I want to tackle it as coherently as possible. My main advice is to take as much space as possible. Be big. Be loud. Speak up. All the time. I understand that might not be for everybody. It’s hard to speak up, so do so as long as you are able to feel safe. Take up a lot of space. Be an advocate for all of the introverted voices regardless of color or other socio-economic factors. Being an advocate for those voices that are less heard in the program, a workspace, or in any other space goes further than anything because it’s not just about you, it’s about your environment. We’re all in this fight together. We must make it a mindful one.
An interview with Diana Khoi Nguyen
(conducted by Peter Mishler for Literary Hub)
Peter Mishler: I wanted to start by asking you about the book’s triptychs which are made of both visual and written texts. Could you talk about your experience of making these?
Diana Khoi Nguyen: The triptychs emerged as a response to the silence surrounding an action of my brother’s two years before his suicide. In 2012, in the middle of the night, Oliver took every hanging portrait of the family down from the walls of our childhood home, and carefully sliced his visage out of each photograph before returning the framed pictures back in their places. My parents didn’t notice right away, and when they did, they were alarmed, but couldn’t address it directly with Oliver. They asked me what to do, and I recommended that we talk to Oliver about it. I tried to, and that was the last time I communicated with my brother.
Two years later, Oliver removed himself from the family via suicide; the pictures still hanging in our childhood home like awful portends, and then, memorials. And still, my family wouldn’t talk about these cutout photographs. Around the first anniversary of his death, I wanted to address this silence surrounding the images and what resulted were these triptychs.
The first part is the photograph, the second part is a word-text which fills in the body that has been cut out, and the third part is my attempt to use poetry as a frame to support the white space, the person who is no longer here. In the photographs, my parents are in their late 20s, early 30s, myself at seven or whatever age I was then. The text of the triptychs is also a way of thinking about time—about who we were then.
I didn’t have the pictures prior to writing the triptychs, so I asked my sister to scan them, which meant she’d have to take them down from the walls of our family home. I said to her, “This is something we are not talking about, that haunts us. And I’m not trying re-traumatize you in doing this but I’m hoping to do something that is reparative or restorative with them.”
So there I was, in the middle of the night, staring at the zoomed in scans. I could see where the X-Acto knife blade cut—all these minute details, like where he missed part of his foot. Did you mean to miss part of your foot there? I had all these mundane questions.
The first impulse was to fill in the white space of the cutout—which is so small. It was a new form which dictated how many words and characters I could use, which was another form of editing which I found really liberating. I didn’t have to think about line breaks—and I also couldn’t finish my sentence since the form would abruptly end. I appreciated the constraint.
The restraint liberated sentiments in me that I had previously been unable to express. Once I started to write within the framework of the photograph it unleashed all these sentiments that I hadn’t been able to admit to myself consciously or say out loud to anyone. And I cried for the first time. I didn’t cry at the funeral and I didn’t cry that whole first year until then. There was something about working with what my brother left behind, in finally allowing myself language, in thinking about my family, our pasts—this act opened up all the emotions that had been dammed up.
PM: I wondered, while reading this collection, about your experience of grief in relation to other members of your family’s experiences.
DKN: Let me share something else about my family. My parents went to work the day after they found his body. They took days off, I mean, for the funeral on Christmas Eve, but they are practical. I think they must’ve thought, “What else are we going to do? Sit around and feel terrible?” As industrious workers who rarely used up their vacation days, my pragmatic parents did not cultivate a family space where we talked about our feelings; we definitely did not cry in front of each other.
There was something in this act that was healing for me, in terms of the process. Once I finished working on one photograph-cutout, I realized that there was a lot of unresolved emotions and histories left in the other remnants. Of course, I couldn’t work on each photograph all at once—I had to take some time in between, because it was also deeply depressing. Each time I sat to write, I had to stare at our past faces, at the void of my brother—I had to return to a place of terrible grief. But it was also vital work—because of the floodgates that opened—I hadn’t known what was trapped, that I had felt numb for so long.
So working with the photographs was a cathartic, therapeutic process, so why share this work, why make the private so public (via publication in a book)? To do so renders us vulnerable and naked in our most vulnerable moment as a family. I asked myself this question over and over just before sending it off for consideration. Why include this in a collection?
I will say this: what came out in the filling of those frames and spaces were sentiments that I had not heard other people express whether in the aftermath of death or suicide or any kind of other absence or loss. It was my desire to make public what I had not had as company in grief—to offer this work to others who may have experienced loss as a kind of support system. I wish someone had told me, “You are going to have, or you might have, unseemly, unkind thoughts about the deceased. It’s okay, because I have them too.”
So much decorum is expected at a funeral or wake. But life and death and grief are complicated. My brother was a violent person. There’s a story I don’t tell people: in the years leading up to his death, my parents wouldn’t eat the food in the fridge because they were concerned that my brother might be poisoning them. At the funeral, everyone was talking about Oliver as if he had been a saint. I remember thinking, “No, he was a violent person, he was troubled, why don’t we talk about it frankly?” But no one ever wanted to talk about it frankly. I had complicated feelings—I was angry and I was relieved, I was relieved that my parents didn’t have to live in fear anymore. But that’s a not-nice feeling; I wanted to offer all the feelings—longing, mourning, and not-nice feelings for the sake of transparency.
PM: Could you talk a little bit about your experience with sharing your work with your family, and their thoughts about it?
DKN: Absolutely. It’s important to be transparent about this difficult process when writing directly about people who exist in real life, whether they are family or friends, regardless of whether we change identity markers, such as names.
Some writers wait until the family member written about is deceased, but my family is very much alive, and I include photographs of us together, real identifying information.
Before I continue, I’ll preface this by sharing that my relationship with my mother was fraught for a long time. It has transformed since my brother’s passing, as my parents became aware of the mortality of our family as a unit, so we’ve all adjustments and changes in how we engage with each other.
Several years before my brother’s death, my mother would Google my name on the internet and read anything I had published—a symptom of our non-communication and nearly non-existent relationship. When I finally saw her, things were tense, per usual, and she shared, “I read what you wrote about me.” She was embarrassed, upset with me. She had taken any mother figure in my work to be a direct negative portrayal of her as my mother. When I tried to explain that the figures in the poem weren’t necessarily, and most often were not representations of her, she called bullshit. She said, “If you ever write about me, or our family, I will sue you for slander.”
In typical bratty form, I responded that I wouldn’t agree to what she was asking, knowing the difficult burden of proof slander cases require to hold up in a court of law. I felt at first irked by her request for censorship, but later recognized that my mother felt estranged from me and ultimately wanted a healthier mother-daughter relationship, but didn’t know how to ask for one (can such a thing even be requested?)
PM: Right.
DKN: And then my brother died, and I wrote a whole book about our family and suicide’s aftermath. When I was writing, I didn’t worry about my mother’s threat because I didn’t have plans to publish the work, and even if I did, I figured the book would take a long time (years) to get picked up, if it ever did. But I was wrong—the book got picked up immediately.
Which is to say, I knew I had to speak with my mother and family before the book’s publication. I called my parents and said, “Okay, one, I have a book coming out.” “That’s great!” they replied. Then, I shared, “I know you asked me never to write about family, but I have to tell you what the book is about: I wrote about my personal grief process after Oliver’s death. It’s not directly about either of you, but I did work with the photographs Oliver cut himself out of. Each of you may appear in it in various ways, but my intent was not to say anything negative about anybody. You appear in it because we all are part of this family, but the book is primarily about my grief experience.” My mother paused, then asked when I would become a bestseller like J.K. Rowling. It was as if she hadn’t heard me, but I know she had; she’s very business oriented at times, which I appreciated in that moment.
Later she would ask, “Why does anybody care about your grief?” and she meant it earnestly. It baffled her that anyone outside our family would care about what happened to us, what we went through. When they came to my book launch, I was nervous and very strategic about what I read aloud. To this day, I don’t think my mother has read the book. She doesn’t really read books, and I don’t think she ever will.
There are parts in Ghost Of that refer to a mother-figure. It’s a risk. My mother asked me to write about nature. And, well, I wrote about human nature, knowing well that she probably wanted me to write about flowers. I have chosen to honor my family but also to honor my own experience as well—reconciling our differences and needs. The last thing I wanted was permission to write, permission to publish. Each family operates differently, and I’ve had to tread carefully in sharing my work with my own family.
PM: Throughout the book there are instances that feel like acts of communication on your part with your brother. You are talking about how your relationship with your mother has expanded as a result of your work. Could you talk about the furthering of your relationship with your brother through these poems?
DKN: At the University of Denver (during my PhD), I took a hermeneutics class and one of the assignments was to write a radical eulogy. And the light bulb moment happened, complete with audio: “Bing!”
Even though those two words activated a lot of neural activity, I had to ask myself what they actually meant: “radical eulogy.” At the time, I had been following the Boston Review forum on radical empathy, initiated by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom. He had kicked off the forum with a divisive piece titled “Against Empathy.” Ultimately, Bloom argued for a different kind of empathy, not the one where you put yourself in someone else’s shoes, because in so doing, you put yourselves through the trauma of others, and the cost of doing so is high (emotionally, physically, etc.) Bloom advocated for something akin to sympathy, being with someone who has gone through something traumatic or difficult. Of course, this sparked a lively debate from writers, scientists, and so forth.
I wanted to go in the direction of danger, of discomfort. I asked myself, “What’s the most uncomfortable empathetic thing I can do. Oh, I could try to recreate and retrace my brother’s steps leading up to his suicide, and then build a coffin and then burn that coffin.”
PM: Would you share what you did?
DKN: My brother was cremated in a Buddhist-monk-facilitated ceremony; he was in a cardboard box which was placed inside a coffin. When the time came, we slid the cardboard box into the crematorium chamber; I could see the fire of the oven. It was a terrifying, disturbing moment in the ceremony for me.
Rather than avoid that which terrified me, I wanted to revisit the scary thing and hopefully reduce its negative power over me.
We know my brother ate McDonald’s the night of his death because there were McDonald’s wrappers in the trashcan. Oliver never ate McDonald’s during his life. Isn’t that the rub: you think you know somebody then you find proof otherwise. And then they’re dead and you can’t ask them why. “Why did you eat McDonald’s? Was it to help the medication you took to kill yourself?” I had all these mundane thoughts—not, “Why did you kill yourself,” but “What did you order from McDonald’s?”
In my radical eulogy, I went to McDonald’s and I tried to imagine what Oliver ordered. I don’t eat McDonald’s, either—and made some guesses, brought the food home and ate it. I think I cried while eating all of it—there’s something about trying to imagine someone’s last supper and then replicating it.
After eating, I built a cardboard box, I built the combustible coffin and laid in it every day for 20 minutes. I thought it was going to be terrifying, but it was actually wonderful. And I don’t recommend this for everybody, but I will say this: it is relaxing to lie in a box that’s open on the top. It has tall walls, so you can’t see anything around you—you can only see the sky or the ceiling of your room. Eventually, I took my coffin out into the Colorado mountains. There was something liberating about having blinders on your periphery and being forced to look up. It became this meditative space where I could speak to my brother. In it, I asked him so many questions, mundane and also profane. I don’t think I could have done that normally, while cooking spaghetti or brushing my teeth. There was something about this empathetic act where I felt closer to him because I was attempting not only to retrace what happened to his physical body after he died, but also what happened just before.
The day after Oliver died, my father picked me up at LAX and he was wearing a Carhartt beanie, so I said, “Oh I really like your beanie, Dad, it’s so hip.” He replied, “It was your brother’s.” And I thought, Oh fuck. He went on, “Your brother bought two of everything. Do you want the other one?” And I responded with something along the lines of, “Hell no, get that beanie away from me.” My father wanted to remember and be close to his son, and I wanted to be as far as possible from anything associated with the dead person. And that’s how I felt all that first year.
Doing the radical empathy project allowed me to get closer to Oliver and not be scared; I’m not sure what I was afraid of, maybe that his suicide could be contagious for me as a sibling. With radical empathy, radical eulogy, I could more safely approach communing with him. Of course, all this isn’t literally in the book, but that’s what I was doing while writing the book, and I feel like that energy is present in it.
PM: You mentioned that your brother was cremated in a ceremony conducted by a Buddhist monk, and that made me wonder if you grew up in a family that practiced Buddhism, firstly, and then I wondered about the possible connection between the radical empathy project and Buddhism—are any other relationships between your work as an artist and writer, and Buddhism?
DKN: Honestly, I had thought my family to be Buddhist only culturally—its only manifestations in my life prior to Oliver’s death were the deceased ancestor altars and occasional “blessing” of fruits brought home from the market. I’m not sure if “blessing” is the right word—we would place fruit in front of our Buddha altar for a bit (no more than a day) and could only eat it after it had been at the altar, but not before.
I’m not well-versed in Buddhism or how it handles death and mourning practices, but this is what I recall from Oliver’s funeral: Vietnamese Buddhist monks releasing his spirit from the garage where he killed himself, and the white robes we had to wear during the cremation service. There was a lot of chanting, some wooden percussion instrument. Oliver’s ashes had to remain at the temple for 49 days before my parents retrieved them. They later scattered the ashes from a boat in the Pacific.
As a writer, I don’t think much can be traced between myself and Buddhism, but the idea of feeding the dead does appear in my work. In Vietnamese culture, there is a feast and memorial on the anniversary of each ancestor’s death. It’s like a birthday, but with no birth. A lot of food is prepared, blessed, and eaten—a way for families to come together to remember and honor those who are no longer here.
With my brother, my parents took this a little further: they prepare meals for Oliver’s altar every day, three times a day. I don’t think you’re supposed to eat the food that’s been left out for the dead (it’s their meal), and my parents don’t eat it, but also don’t throw it out since throwing out food is wasteful. So they have my sister or me (when I’m visiting) eat it. Which is funny to me—I’m not superstitious nor am I religious, but every now and then I think: I’m eating the pre-eaten meal of the dead. Does that mean the oatmeal is soulless?
PM: What kind of life or presence does the book have for you now that it has been out in the world for over a year? Could you talk a little about your understanding of the relationship between a poet and her collection after gaining some distance from its inception and completion?
DKN: Thank you for asking this—I wish I had thought about this prior to the book’s publication, or at least that someone could have prepared me. Absolutely the book has its own life once it’s published and available for others—strangers, people I might never meet.
I believe my role was to introduce it as an offering, to help others read and hear it the way that it reads to me—the way that I hear it in my head. But then, it’s a beautiful thing for the book to continue on without my mediation—and necessary, too.
Now, I find myself wanting to move past the book. That is, to stop reading from it, as doing so not only brings me back to a very difficult moment in my life, but also to focus on my current projects which extend beyond poetry on the page.
A friend once said it’s like a parent-child relationship: you produce it, and it’ll always be a part of you, but it’s off traveling, living simultaneously in other worlds, with other people. In a physical sense, it won’t die in the same way that a parent will, but it can go unnoticed or live a lot longer in others’ consciousnesses than you, the parent, will. And I’m grateful for this—all the possibilities. The book-child was like a door, re-entry into life, out of a terrible moment in my life. It was painful, but it helped me renew faith in life, in the future. And now the book lives on elsewhere with others (maybe). From the few strangers I’ve met at readings—it appears the book has helped them with their grief and traumas similarly. The credit is with the book, not really with me.
In a way, I was conduit/mediator for the experience to be captured, and now the experience moves elsewhere. The experience being Ghost Of, that is.
It doesn’t mean that the grief or traumas of my life are resolved, that I’m all healed, but that time has passed, I have done the work of Ghost Of, and now I’m doing other work. I may return to concepts of grief, but I’m not the same now as I was before Ghost Of, if that makes sense. As if I’ve traversed along the non-linear, endless journey of mourning, which is survival and living.
PM: What’s the strangest thing you know to be true about the art of poetry?
DKN: The first thing that comes to mind is Snow White. Not Snow White herself, but the queen who consults the mirror which acts as a kind of oracle. Am I full of shit today, poem? I think I’m like the queen: I do do that.
Sometimes I think I know what’s going to happen in a poem because I have some awareness of what’s going on in my own mind at the moment. But when I start to work on a poem, the poem shows me otherwise—I didn’t and don’t know anything at all. I didn’t realize I was going to write about that, or I realize, Oh no, I am obsessed with this. Somehow the latent topics emerge. Of course, it’s not precisely like this, 1:1, but the poem-mirror-oracle offers me information in augury form.
I realized this during undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops when I offered my work to the room, and the other writers would begin talking about my work and immediately I would feel very naked, very seen—a panic: How could these relative strangers know these inner thoughts I’ve never shared? That I didn’t think the poem was sharing? But they didn’t know, they were just talking about the poem, as close readers. But in their discussion, I saw myself bare on the table and felt terrified.
I can’t hide from myself. In poetry, the latent, existential ineffable can be transformed via my imagination. Since coming to this realization, I try to call myself out when I’m exhibiting avoidant behavior, or trying to obscure something. I write to confront myself on the page; this might not be how it is for others, but it continues to be true for me.
An interview with Diana Khoi Nguyen
(conducted by Eva Heisler for Asymptote)
For the poems in Ghost Of, you worked with family photographs from which your brother, a couple of years before his suicide, had cut out his own image. Did you start with text and then cut into it, or did you compose around the empty space created by your brother?
The image came first. I rendered the image transparent and put a text box over it. I wrote into the space, and then around the white space, around the part where my brother had cut himself out. I used the image as a constraint for the poem, to give the poem a shape.
I read Ghost Of long before I heard you read from it. I was so surprised, when I heard you read, that you broke right at the cut created by the shape of your brother’s absence, whether that cut occurred in the middle of a word or immediately after an initial consonant. Can you say more about how you are working with the line break?
In using the image and the absence of image—the white space also as an image, with the intentional white space that my brother created—I created the frame, or the walls around which the text would have to run up against.
When I was writing the poem, for each of the spaces—whether it was the poem shard, or the text as frame around the shard—I’d have to cut off the word wherever the white space was, and then start across. I would have to leap over that white space. It’s jarring to do that. You have the momentum of a sentence, or the line, or the thought, or the image, and then, because of this violence within the visual image, it cuts you off—and then you start again. For me, that enacts the process of grief. Loss, the sudden death of somebody, is a jarring stump within your life, but you must continue. Life moves on, and then there’s a sudden jolt of absence, and then continuation.
I had never done anything like that previously with line breaks, or even the line. When I did that, it felt right. That’s how I was feeling at the time, and in many ways doing that allowed me access to a lot of stuff that I hadn’t been able to access during the funeral, and previously in my grieving process. Personally, it was useful for my own understanding of grief, history, familial trauma, and just having to revisit memory and my own personal history.
My reading of the work is also inspired by hearing Susan Howe read. When she reads her own grief text in That This, which surrounds her husband’s death, I was also so shocked to hear her read the shards of language. It sounds like a kind of choking when she reads; it sounds like the actual sound of grief, the jarring, the rubbing, the tension of her own lines. She’s an inspiration in thinking about reading and visual-text work.
Susan Howe has a background in the visual arts. You do, too, don’t you? In your video Would That—A Hermeneutics of Grief, you are seen making collages.
The collage work happened while writing the book. I’ve always been interested in the arts, but I never pursued it formally. I am primarily trained as a poet, but something happened after my brother’s death: words just weren’t enough; a poem just wasn’t enough to embody that experience, and also that journey that I was going on in terms of investigating what happened when we were younger, and also what happened to my parents before they met each other and had children.
So, no formal training in the arts, but a lot of experimentation and play. A lot of my work right now is video. I’m in a Ph.D. program in creative writing at the University of Denver, and I have taken sound and multimedia courses in the emergent digital practices department. My dissertation includes plays, videos, and sound work.
In the video Would That, are the collages that we see you making stand-alone pieces, or were they only enacted for the video?
They are stand-alone pieces. That collage work opened me to other ways of using found materials. I am working in video in terms of the body, materiality, and paper. Part of it, too, is a radical exercise in empathy, thinking about what that means to cut yourself out, which is what my brother did.
I am thinking more broadly now, after the book, of the larger experiences that produced my parents. I’m interested in intergenerational storytelling in trauma within the Vietnam diaspora. My creative dissertation is, in part, an examination of the refugee experience forty-plus years later, after the end of the Vietnam War, with the hope of understanding assimilation, adaptation, and resilience within a very specific former refugee community within the United States.
Did your family speak Vietnamese at home? Did you grow up with the sounds of the language?
Yes, I was fluent in Vietnamese until about seven. Around that time, my parents only wanted me to speak English for schooling purposes. This past December, I was in Vietnam and I spent the month taking extensive language lessons. I am continuing that process over Skype each week, but it’s not the same as being immersed in the country. I want to eventually do translation work. I have a long way to go, but I may as well start somewhere.
Have you experimented with multilingual poems?
In December, when I was in Vietnam, I was writing poems and, because I was only speaking Vietnamese, it was quite natural that the language emerged in my writing. A lot of the work I’m doing right now uses footage from home videos, and when I watch myself as a young child speaking only Vietnamese, it is so foreign. I don’t remember what was captured. I am watching myself as an object, and I am wrestling now with this lost language.
Several poems in Ghost Of are titled “Gyotaku.” You’re referencing this traditional method of printing from fish because you’re “printing” from the absent body of your brother?
Essentially, there’s the absent body which I fill in with text, so the absence is rendered into a visual text. Gyotaku is a practice using dead fish to create an impression of what had been captured, an old practice before photography existed. It still goes on today. I liked the idea that gyotaku creates just the impression. You can’t capture the whole of the fish, just wherever the ink or the paint was able to touch the body, the scales, and you get an idea of the thing. Thinking about the act of writing and printing—bookmaking is also inked fabric—it makes sense to also begin to claim, to manipulate, to capture this image-text in a visual way.
Bees come up a lot in the book!
The bees are very specifically linked. Since my brother passed, every now and then my mother will call, trying to reconcile what my brother has done. One time she called me and said, “Your brother died because we didn’t believe him.”
I asked, “What do you mean?”
She said, “He was an insomniac for a really long time. One time he told us that he could hear humming in the walls of the house, and that’s why he couldn’t sleep; it kept him up all night. Your father and I looked, and we couldn’t find anything, so we just told him to go to sleep.”
And then she said, referring to the present, “Your father and I were just cleaning the attic, and we found thousands of dead bees.” She said, “We didn’t look hard enough. We didn’t believe him. Maybe he thought he was crazy. He couldn’t sleep so maybe he had to kill himself so he could sleep.” She said this matter-of-factly, but she was just trying to fathom why somebody would kill himself. She feels such guilt.
What I didn’t tell my mother, but I’ve been able to tell strangers (because it’s easier to tell strangers), is that, during one of the years when my brother was still alive, I came home and, in the bathroom I shared with him, I found a dead bee on the windowsill. I threw it away. (This was around the time we’re just learning the colonies were dying off.) Next morning, I went back to the bathroom and there was a dead bee on the windowsill. I looked in the trash, and the first bee was still there. There was no tear in the window, no crack. I didn’t know where these dead bees were trickling out from. Totally weird. I didn’t tell anybody, though. What if I had told somebody?
The bees encapsulate the loneliness, the solitude, the silence in how we fail to communicate in our family. The bees represent all of that, and the guilt. They also represent the failure of our larger ecosystem, and how we as humans are doing so much damage that the colonies are dying off, which will have reverberating effects on other species, and ultimately on our food chain.
The bees appear in the book because of what my mother said, because of what my brother heard, because of what I saw, and because of what’s actually going on with the bees. The bees are an accidental but real metaphor for the larger world.
At some readings—I can’t emotionally do this all the time—I ask the audience to stand, and I tell them the story about my mother and my brother and the bees. I then ask that—as an act against being alone, as an act against suicide—that we all hum for a moment, together, in that space. Everyone can stop humming whenever they want, and I ask for the audience members to trace how sound moves in the room. I think a lot about sound now. And I record each of those sessions. I have a whole catalogue of these humming archives. Each hum session is quite different.
Several poems are called “Triptych.” Were you at all making references to art historical traditions?
No, not specifically, but within the Vietnamese Buddhist tradition, we always have an altar to the dead. There’s a picture of the person and, after every meal of the day, you offer a meal to the dead. The concept of the altar and the images of the dead, and the feeding of the dead, is ingrained into my cultural/ethnic experience.
“Triptych” is not an art historical reference, but the book is divided into three parts, and I think a lot about three in reference to the three siblings, and the rupture out of that unity.
Can you talk some about the new work you are doing, about how you are exploring new media to make poems in other ways?
Most of my video work surrounds radical empathy. For example, I found footage of my parents’ wedding and their honeymoon. Watching these old videos, I see my mother as a young woman, as the same age as I am now, and it’s surreal. I did a project where I took my parents’ honeymoon video, and I sourced all the outfits my mother wore. I then went to Hawaii and I recreated the honeymoon scenes, but with me. It’s a retracing of her steps, in part maybe to further empathize with her, to understand her, because in many ways I don’t understand her.
My mother has been the single node of violence in the family. Things have been quite fraught over the years. After my brother’s death, we’ve come back together. My mother recognizes that she’s made a lot of mistakes, but she isn’t able to fully acknowledge a lot of the things she’s done. What’s been troubling for me is that I find aspects of herself in me.
In that video, it was my mother’s first time away from home. She went from living with her parents to being married to my father. In that video, she doesn’t yet have children; she hasn’t yet committed a lot of terrible acts to her husband and to her children, and her son hasn’t yet died. I retraced those steps that I had access to, and I filmed that process. It’s part of the process of tracing her journey as a refugee in the years afterwards.
When I was in Vietnam, my father took me to the house where he grew up. In another video piece, I’ve combined footage of my father talking about the house he grew up in, which looks very different now, and footage of my father and mother building the house in America that I grew up in (and the house in which my brother killed himself). My father had to flee his home just as the Vietnam War was ending, during the fall of Saigon, so the video piece is a way of thinking about home, and sites of trauma, memory, and history.
It’s interesting how your poems in Ghost Of have led you into other art forms.
Previously I wouldn’t have dared attempt to venture into other media, but I am not trying to be an artist and get showings of my work. I’m just training [in new media] because it makes sense for the kind of topics and themes I’m examining, and it gives me joy, and it feels right. I’m thinking a lot about silence. In poetry, it’s hard to capture silence or tension in the same way that I can do in a play through action, or in video with history.
I’m working a lot with home videos. That family footage is where my brother exists; that’s where he’s alive now. We don’t have him in photographs so much anymore. I can revisit the videos to see him again, or to see one moment in his life. It’s a nice way to be with him.
A Necessary Death in Broad Daylight
Alone in my seat of the roller coaster I seemed to be sitting in a church
The dead cannot distinguish
One female monkey with the resigned look of love at another engaged in
breast-feeding
Even the lion licked the smooth head of the lioness
I must not be consoled
Suppose the person in me is a better mother than the author of a book
I wrote
You reappear in a world which sees no danger in being nude, digging in the
earth for black water, finding passage in hard soil because you no longer
need to find yourself
A successful suicide, that’s the phrase, is when the mother requests of her
surviving daughters that they suppress joy over their lunches just before
she removes her dead son’s slippers from my feet, replacing them with
others
Because, despite everything, you hadn’t lost your hunger, eh?
Where I was young, where I was treated like a boy, where I was intelligent
He was alone in containing his violence
Is it not useless to pursue, for its own sake, the urgency of a previous day?
I loathe it—the likeness of a brother living in the likeness of a body, with lips
and hands and eyes that keep nothing in, nothing out
I would give you my other face to touch
I love them—the likeness of a woman, in her arms the likeness of a child
Once more I begin to move in the direction of the animals