by Paulina Freedman
September 1, 2021
Paulina Freedman is a writer, avid reader, amateur chef, and occasional artist living in the suburbs of Chicago. She has an MA in Writing and Publishing from DePaul University, has studied poetry and fiction writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is an Associate Poetry Editor at West Trade Review. She first fell in love with poetry in her 6th grade Humanities class and has been reading and writing it ever since.
Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen; University of Nebraska Press; 78 pages; $17.95
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora is Susan Nguyen’s debut collection. The book is split into three sections, with the first and third delving into the life of protagonist Suzi, a young girl in the throes of adolescence. The center section, essentially one long poem told in multiple vignettes, focuses on the “boat people,” the name given to refugees who fled Vietnam by boat at the end of the war. Among the unifying themes of the collection are language, coming-of-age, the immigrant experience, and, possibly the most palpable, grief.
Nguyen has stated on her personal website that her poetry is “often interested in the body: how geography, history, and trauma leave markers, both visible and invisible.” This is certainly true throughout Dear Diaspora. In the first of several poems titled “Letter to the Diaspora,” she writes, “Does memory eat the body? / What is the body whittled down? The eyes as locket, mouth, hinge?” The collection’s prologue poem, “The Body as a Series of Questions:,” attempts to deconstruct a body marked by memory and trauma. The poem examines the body as a reflection of its experiences and the world that surrounds it.
In addition to the body, Nguyen addresses the idea of language early in the collection. In one of the introductory poems, “The First Language,” Nguyen writes, “[my father] taught me that our first language was named after tadpoles, the way they moved through water: a knife dissecting the stratosphere, a voice cutting quiet.” This theme of language continues throughout the first and third sections. In “Inventory,” she writes, “what power do we give a word / when spoken aloud / what power is there in / keeping / a word safe / soft / hidden.” Musings on language slowly give way to commentaries on grief, as in the poem “If I Say My Body Is Grieving,” and later in “Grief as a Question:,” where Nguyen writes, “no one told me grief could be so ordinary.” This idea of grief ties the poems from the first and third sections of the book to the central poem, “Boat People.”
The center section of Dear Diaspora is a single poem composed of interconnected fragments, ranging from snippets of official statements made by the Vietnamese government to collage poems made from newspaper articles to obituaries inspired by actual Vietnamese refugees. It is here that the thread of grief throughout the collection becomes most prominent. This motif is continued later in the third section in the poem, “Suzi Doesn’t Miss Her Father,” which contains the line, “Missing someone, she knows, fills you with odd-shaped holes.” Nguyen manages to bring together grief in various forms, from the loss of a parent to the loss of a culture to the loss of identity.
While this collection may resonate most strongly with those who have been through similar diasporic experiences, Nguyen’s use of simple yet effective language, her relatable protagonist experiencing the ups and downs of adolescence in a foreign country, and the tone of sincerity throughout the collection make for a promising debut, and will certainly capture the interest of many a poetry enthusiast.
©2021 West Trade Review
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Grief, Language, and Diaspora: A Review of Susan Nguyen's Debut
Dear Diaspora
POETRY REVIEW
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