An explosive, devastating debut book of poetry from the acclaimed author of The BoatJoin us in celebrating award winning author Nam Le's recent poetic anthology, 36 ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. Nam Le will read from his work and be in conversation with Nick Feik, editor of The Monthly.
“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 the poems comes with its own explosive charge; taken together, they are capable of shaking Western self-regard to its foundations.” —J.M. Coetzee
In his first international release since the award-winning, best-selling The Boat, Nam Le delivers a shot across the bow with a book-length poem that honors every convention of diasporic literature—in a virtuosic array of forms and registers—before shattering the form itself.
In line with the works of Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, this book is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity—and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression, and historical trauma.
But it also means the violence of that assumption. 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 destabilizing energy between the personal and the political. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.
Nam Le’s poetry has been published in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Bomb, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Lana Turner, and The Monthly. He has received major awards in America, Europe, and Australia, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and the Melbourne Prize for Literature. His short story collection The Boat has been republished as a modern classic and is widely translated, anthologized, and taught.
Event Venue
10 Arthur Street Eltham Victoria 3095 Australia, Eltham, VIC, Australia, Victoria 3095
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