Nguyen and Ok will sign copies after the presentation! Signed copies can be mailed anywhere in the country.
about the authors
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen was born and raised in California. His first collection of poetry, Ghost Of, was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open competition and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Colorado Book Award. A Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese diaspora artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s), Nguyen has also received other honors including prizes from the 92Y / “Discovery /” poetry competition, literary seminars from Key West and the Academy of American Poets. She teaches creative writing at Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, edits and teaches poetry.
About root fractures
*One of LitHub's poetry books to read in 2024*
*One of the essential poetry books for winter 2024*
National Book Award finalist Diana Khoi Nguyen's second collection of poetry is a haunting of a family's past about its present and a frank account of how loss and displacement transform mothers and daughters through the generations.
In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen explores the moments of rupture of a family: a mother forced into hiding after the fall of Saigon, a father who built a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself off from all family. photo before completely cutting themselves off from their lives. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to start over mingle with visits to the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after 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 makes poetry an act of kintsugi, beautifying what is broken into a family's legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.
About Ward Toward
Young Yale poet Cindy Juyoung Ok resolutely seeks hope in spaces of fragmentation
/"Ok's craft in this lovely debut is an analytical and elegantly discursive style peppered with ironies./"–David Woo, Literary Hub
/"There are places/", writes Cindy Juyoung Ok, /"where tremors are expected, loss is/assumed./"
In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok certainly moves between spaces—from the psychiatric ward to the prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. She probes these institutions of constraint, from neighborhood to neighborhood, and the role of the language of each reality, word for word, as she uncovers fractured private codes and shares them in arguments, songs and prayers.
Using visual play in invented forms, Ok pushes against familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person's character or will that makes survival possible , but luck and the others. The poems subvert expectations with the comedy of institutionalized adolescents, nostalgia after the climate crisis, tenderness in a retirement home, and the wholeness of faltering Englishmen. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans and copays give or deny meaning? Ok's resolute and energetic debut album moves the cracks of language and reassembles them into a new place of belonging.
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