Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Association for Asian American Studies
New Mexico-Arizona Book Award Winner
Julie Suk Award Finalist
Dear Diaspora is an┬аunapologetic┬аreckoning with history, memory, and grief.┬аParting the weeds on a small American town, this collection┬аsheds light on the intersections of girlhood and diaspora. The poems introduce us to Suzi: ripping her leg hairs out with duct tape, praying for ecstasy during Sunday mass, dreaming up a language for buried familial trauma and discovering that such a language may not exist. Through a collage of lyric, documentary, and epistolary poems, we follow Suzi as she untangles intergenerational grief and her fatherтАЩs disappearance while climbing trees┬аto stare at the color green and wishing that she wore Lucy LiuтАЩs freckles.
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora scrutinizes our turning away from the trauma of our┬аpast and our complicity in its erasure. Suzi, caught between enjoying a rundown American adolescence and living with the inheritances of war, attempts to unravel her own inherited grief as she explores the multiplicities of identity and selfhood against the backdrop of the Vietnamese┬аdiaspora. In its deliberate interweaving of voices, Dear Diaspora explores SuziтАЩs journey while bringing to light other incarnations of the refugee experience.