#nam le

[smokefalls]

The need to deflect via humour qua coping mechanism is a violence.

Nam Le, "32. Intra-diasporic" from 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

[aaknopf]

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Nam Le, celebrated author of The Boat, makes his poetic debut with a collection titled, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. Reading these pieces, which expose the harm, humor, and difficulty of language itself for a Vietnamese refugee living in the West, we come across far more than thirty-six ways of understanding Le’s diasporic experience. Number 17, offered here, centers the kitchen as a place of generational knowledge and boundary-crossing.

[17. Culinary]

(OFFERTORY)

I put a little...                        see if you can guess

sweet or bitter—                        how know one without the other?

longan, mangosteen     sapodilla                       star anise & lotus seed

something from the karstic north                        but with Western tang

passed on from my mother                        and her mother     and hers...

blood ligament     of kitchen labour                        wisdom     all compressed

into this blank deep-strata rock.                        Yes, the geode pulses

with secret inward gleams                        but it stays silent.

Until now!     Until me!                        My tongue rings all!

I am loud with every flavour, every humour,                        equally of north, south, east, west

and     as she made me                        I will make you, mother.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem and The Boat by Nam Le.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

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[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

Nam Le - Aegic / All-encompassing

[tjagbo]

Nam’s hell note, 2019

[gilgai]

these flexures are all reflections, motion-glyphs, pitches of impediment

Les Murray, “Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands”

[Murray’s] gift is to defamiliarise, even denature, shared perception – its mesh of acculturated assumptions and emotions ... To say things differently is to read things differently is to see and hear (and feel) them differently. — Nam Le, “Les Murray’s magisterial ‘Collected Poems’”, The Monthly, December 2018 - January 2019

[smokefalls]

Let them call and let them come: You are safe in memory.

Nam Le, "27. Matri-immigral" from 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

[smokefalls]

Translation is a violence.

Nam Le, "5. Violence: Taxonomic" from 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

[ofsilentseas]

We were locked in all the intricate ways of guilt.

Nam Le, The Boat, 2008.