Dear Diaspora

Dear Diaspora is an unapologetic reckoning with history, memory, and grief. Parting the weeds on a small American town, this collection sheds 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 father’s disappearance while climbing trees to stare at the color green and wishing that she wore Lucy Liu’s freckles. Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora scrutinizes our turning away from the trauma of our past 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 diaspora. In its deliberate interweaving of voices, Dear Diaspora explores Suzi’s journey while bringing to light other incarnations of the refugee experience.

About the Author :
Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021 / the87press 2025) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award . Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Rumpus, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. She is currently the editor in chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Review :
The first poem of Nguyen's powerful debut asks: "At the center of your calamity, what grows?" That question serves as an entry point for poems that interweave grief, exodus, and girlhood... Nguyen's poetry reveals a remarkable embrace of complexity while accounting for the difficulties of complicity, witness, and forgiveness. —Publishers Weekly Starred Review The collection asks very early, “Do you feel safe wrecking language?” and continues to decipher girlhood, familial trauma, and otherness through that lens. Through the epistolary title poems, the poet builds kinship with other members of the diaspora in the background of an engulfing whiteness. She asks what it means to live with the inheritance of grief and trauma while the past continues to haunt the present. And the abrasions of the present, in the form of racial violence, speak directly to the Vietnamese-American experience... Nguyen, through her adept use of repetition and parsing prose poems in intervals, allows her poems to call to each other... Where is the beginning and where is the end — of memory? of grief? of youth? Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora explores these questions by leading us through a girlhood steeped in loss and longing. In a series of interconnected poems that read like a kaleidoscope of memories, Nguyen’s protagonist Suzi grapples with finding her place in the Vietnamese diaspora after the loss of her father. She makes lists of questions, conducts Google searches, and writes letters to the diaspora. In this excavation of her past and present, Suzi steps from the greenness of childhood into a new awareness of who she is. Nguyen deftly moves through anaphora, questions (“Can you list the responsibilities of a needle? When did you lose the color green?”), epistolary, prose poem, and documentary poetry forms, chronicling girlhood, family history, a father’s disappearance, and the lives of Vietnam War refugees. I’m drawn to the expanse of these poems, how they move across the page, their candor and admissions, the conversations and the asking—to attend to what one doesn’t know and can’t know between the generations in the Vietnamese immigrant community (“My mother said: Our country no longer exists”). These attentive poems are vivid in their grief, wonder, play, and insistence on memory and imagination (“how to speak about language where there is no language . . . I am 2 parts fish sauce / 1 part lime juice sugar dissolving / a wet match”). A curious, empathetic and beautiful debut. —Poetry Book Society