My Debut Poetry Collection is Coming Out!

On the land of sinking and bitter rice fields, I reckon the generosity that my people offer the world amid their struggles.

It took me a flight to the other side of the world, two years of reading and writing, and many re-writing for this debut poetry collection, Drowning Dragon Slips by Burning Plains, to take shape and be published by Texas Tech University this Autumn, October 2023.

I invite you to venture into my world: The motherland of abundance, The infinite horizon of rice, hiding a violent and faceless past. 

One day, a piece of an island eroded into the Mekong River. I was standing by an old woman, witnessing her land shredding itself away. Layers of earth flesh were exposed: brownish clay, red fertile soil, bright yellow sand, light gray gravel. The Mekong Delta is sinking into the sea because of climate changes and greedy development.

In the soil, the past forms billowing smoke rising from deaf eardrums. The past erodes, sandbanks carving, children chasing traveling ghosts. My neighbors are generous. They are kind to murderers who overturned their ancestors’ altars. They forgive powerful hands slaughtering their swamps and choking river paths through French colonization, the American War, and the communist relentless consumption.

I search my path of writing – a blind child wandering in mazes of forgetfulness. The reality is too painful to recollect. Many wars passed, and genocides took place. Those hurt by bloodshed avoid talking about it; those benefiting from conflicts brag without hesitation. We lie to each other to live on without being tortured by our consciences. History unpeels itself like layers of soil, painstakingly, with cruel kindness. I eat lies and digest forgetfulness.

Like the eroding land, deep layers of truth and sincerity lie beneath a terrifying surface. At the same time, I consciously know that I would not witness the vibrancy of reality without the delta being consumed by the sea and suffocating by the concrete greed of the new dawn.

The book is written as a documentary poetry manuscript, meditating through the documents I could approach, many of which were released from the CIA classified document 50 years after they were written.

Some poems in the book are written from the position of a daughter in the vast connection with her world, in which the rice her mother harvests feeds the wealth of many countries, the wars her father survived were instrumented by the relentless judgment of inhuman, powerful forces, the rice she is eating is turning bitter by the Mekong water, suffocated in the water greed of climate change century.

Here is one of the poems from my collection:

The book is ready to be PRE-ORDERED now in the US at Bookshop.org, Texas Tech University Website, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, in Canada at Amazon Canada, in Europe at Amazon UK, in Switzerland, Hungaria, in Portugal and Asia at Amazon Japan.

I run into the arms of my river.