{ "item_title" : "Root Fractures", "item_author" : [" Diana Khoi Nguyen "], "item_description" : "*One of Time's Must-Read Books of 2024**One of Electric Lit's Best Poetry Collections of 2024**One of LitHub's Poetry Books to Read in 2024**One of The Millions's Must-Read Poetry Books of Winter 2024* National Book Award finalist Diana Khoi Nguyen's second poetry collection, a haunting of a family's past upon its present, and a frank reckoning with how loss and displacement transform mothers and daughters across generations. In Root Fractures, 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. This 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.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/66/803/130/1668031302_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "18.00", "online_price" : "18.00", "our_price" : "18.00", "club_price" : "18.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s second collection of poems, the speaker is haunted by echoes of the past that reverberate into the present, and by generational, individual and collective traumas. In deft and surprising ways, the forms of the poems interact with their content, both shaping and breaking it. The poems center on the speaker's interrogation of her memory, which is inherently tied to a pattern of displacement and disappearance in her family history, through her parents’ emigration from Vietnam, Vietnam’s reform movement (Dổi Mới) and her childhood in California. Root Fractures begins in Vietnamese, and, as a non-speaker or reader of the language, I found myself drawn in, curious to see what I would discover even in moments where I was not the intended audience. The poems are deeply affecting. There’s a balance between fragmentation—both at the level of individual lines and of whole poems—and accumulative moments where the fragments coalesce. Some poems are layered over photographs, some are cut and rearranged, recalling how the speaker’s brother cut himself out of family photographs before eventually taking his own life. The spaces left on the page provide pauses that make the words sing in new ways, while the repeated formal motifs create patterns for reading and meaning-making that mirror the speaker's experience of a desire for wholeness and understanding that can’t be fully realized. These are poems worth returning to; each reading brings discoveries of new pathways of tension and connection.