White Whale Bookstore will host a book launch for Diana Khoi Nguyen's Root Fractures on January 30.
Our poetry-loving staff are big fans of National Book Award finalist and Pitt prof Diana Khoi Nguyen’s work, and we are so excited to host her in-store for the release of her second poetry collection, Root Fractures, 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. Diana will be joined by poets S. Brook Corfman, Trish Le, and Chet'la Sebree, who will be reading their own work on the topic of family.It runs from 7:00 to 8:00 pm at the White Whale Bookstore in Bloomfield (map). Masks are required for in-person attendees. It will also streamed online. Registration is required for both options.
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.
Poet and multimedia artist DIANA KHOI NGUYEN was born and raised in California. Her debut poetry collection Ghost Of was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Colorado Book Award. A Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese diasporic artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s), Nguyen’s other honors include awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry Contest, Key West Literary Seminars, and Academy of American Poets. She teaches creative writing at Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
