Review by Booklist Review
Two years before taking his own life, Nguyen's brother severed himself from a series of family photographs. In this commanding first collection, winner of the Omnidawn Open, Nguyen presents black-and-white reproductions of these images, forging silhouette- and shard-shaped poems as well as gaping fissures from every incision. Haunting, incisive, and exceptionally spare, 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. Nguyen also employs incantatory repetition to chilling effect. In the stunning final verse of the concluding poem, Nguyen vows: I . . . will fill in for you, fill you in until the end; I will never give you up I will never give up I will never. A soaring tribute, a mesmerizing visual feat, and an all-around astonishing debut.--Shemroske, Briana Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. In "Triptych," a blurry family portrait displays a small figure cut out of the front row; the dead one's thoughts ("mind/ ful of/ the setti/ ing he co/ unted off/ the seconds/ in his head") subsequently fill the cut-out shape of the preceding page; and the final section inserts the speaker's detached, obsessive, looping voice in the space of the original photograph while still preserving the original cut-out's white space. Poems that follow map the violent impact of the brother's ghostly presence in the speaker's life: "A mother sticks a spoon into my chest,/ which is an empty bowl, actually,// so the spoon lands quickly/ and loudly." The visual experimentation in such poems as "Gyotaku," which refers to a Japanese print method used by fishermen to record catches, hint at the creativity survivors need to fill in the gaps. Though devastating, Nguyen's impressive lyrico-visual rendering details survival despite overwhelming tragedy. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
