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In Root Fractures (Scribner), National Book Award finalist Diana Khoi Nguyen excavates the moments of rupture in a family: a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to begin anew blend with visitations from the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after a disaster and how we can make a story out of the broken pieces of our lives. As Terrance Hayes writes, "'There is nothing that is not music' for this poet. Poetry is found in the gaps, silences, and ruptures of history." Nguyen’s astonishing second collection renders poetry into an act of kintsugi, embellishing what is broken in a family's legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.In Ward Toward (Yale University Press), Yale Younger Poet Cindy Juyoung Ok moves assuredly between spaces — from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. She plumbs these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of each reality's language, word to word, as she uncovers fractured private codes and shares them in argument, song, and prayer. Using visual play in invented forms, Ok counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person's character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. The poems disrupt expectation with the comedy of institutionalized teens, nostalgia after the climate crisis, tenderness in a nursing home, and the wholeness of faltering Englishes. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok's resolute, energized debut shifts language's fissures to reassemble them into a new place of belonging.
Preorder a Signed Edition of Root Fractures: https://www.powells.com/book/root-fractures-9781668031308/1-2
Preorder a Signed Edition of Ward Toward: https://www.powells.com/book/ward-toward-9780300273922/1-1
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