36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

In his first international release since the award-winning, bestselling The Boat, Nam Le delivers a shot across the bow with a book-length poem which 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.

Steeped in formal tradition and current practice, Le’s poetic debut is at the same time destabilised and destabilising. It deploys multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages as tools both of survival and guerrilla assault on prevailing certainties. It moves with unpredictable energy between the personal and political, reclaiming intimacies amidst the reverberations of history but always wary of easy resolution or lyric redemption. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.

“Exquisitely crafted fire bombs of incandescent rage. Moving and powerful.” —Nick Cave

“From the opening lines, I knew this book would gut me. I wasn’t wrong. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is an exhaustive examination of the complex stew of emotions every displaced person experiences. In Nam Le’s deft hands, deep scholarship is transformed into a nimble, nuanced romp, replete with devastating wit, sonic acrobatics, and superb mouth feel. I’ve been waiting for this book all my diasporic life.” —Barbara Tran, author of In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words