36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
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36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
Narrated by:
Nam Le
Buy Now for $13.99
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Narrated by:
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Nam Le
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By:
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Nam Le
About this listen
Fifteen years after his best-selling, award-winning collection of stories The Boat, Nam Le returns to his great themes of identity and representation in a virtuosic debut book of poetry
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, says Le, a Vietnamese refugee to Australia, is ‘the book I needed to write. The book I've been writing my whole life’. This book-length poem is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity and the violence of identity, embedded with racism, oppression and historical trauma. But it also addresses the violence in those assumptions – of being always assumed to be outside one’s 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, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilising energy between the personal and political, honouring every convention of diasporic literature – in a virtuosic 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, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.
'Nam Le takes the English language to pieces and reassembles it with a virtuoso ease not seen since Finnegans Wake' J.M. Coetzee
'A masterly performance' David Malouf
'These poems seethe and sing' Cathy Park Hong
Critic Reviews
You fight your way into these difficult poems, you wrangle with their knots and mysteries, then you turn a page, and a blast of clarity – ghosts, herbs, diamonds – clears the air for miles around. (Helen Garner, author of The Season)
This lean book took my breath away. Le’s linked poems (36, and one dismantlingly lovely coda) glow with anger and curiosity. They take the heavy cuts of history – the interwoven violences of colonialism, war, racism – and bear them up in a lethal kind of play. Running through it all is Le’s wry and relentlessly observational self, carving out a form that can hold the pain and grace of family love.
‘Each poem in 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem stings as if Nam Le burned syllables onto the page with a pyrographic pen. These poems seethe and sing; they restlessly shapeshift as Nam Le tries to find a mode of speech or form that could capture the violent history of war and the experience of deracination. But the English language stops short and he captures that gap – and the unspeakable realms of racialized consciousness – with virtuosic and ineffable beauty.’ (Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings)
‘With a cool outsider’s eye, Nam Le takes the English language to pieces and reassembles it with a virtuoso ease not seen since Finnegans Wake. There is wit aplenty, of a dancing, ironic kind, but the fury and the bitterness that underlie 36 Ways come without disguise, as do its moments of aching love and loss. Nam Le is a poet working at the height of his powers. Each of his 36 poems comes with its own explosive charge; taken together, they are capable of shaking Western self-regard to its foundations.’ (JM Coetzee, Nobel laureate 2003)
‘Exquisitely crafted fire bombs of incandescent rage. Moving and powerful.’ (Nick Cave, author of Faith, Hope And Carnage)
‘Le’s verve and uncanny ear for language drive this stunning collection that explores the varied and often tense ways of living as part of the Vietnamese diaspora. The book simultaneously dismantles linguistic and hegemonic forces of violence which plague the diasporic condition and threads a fine lyric in which I felt deeply moved. In Le’s poems, I am both witness and can find myself in the larger tapestry. This book is fine electricity.’ (Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost Of)
‘A masterly performance. With defiant playfulness and wit Nam Le dramatises for us (for “You”) the challenging contradictions of being a writer in the “Unself-consciousness” of the Vietnamese diaspora.’ (David Malouf, author of Remembering Babylon)
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