Oakland, CA: Omnidawn, 2018. 88 pages. $17.95.
Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection Ghost Of is an exploration of family, identity, and the indelible but shifting imprints of grief. In any great poetry, the white space is as inflected as the text, and Nguyen has crafted a book wherein the white space is so inflected it seems to vibrate. Some poems are arranged tidily, corralled into numbered sections, while others careen across the page. In the former, the white space often reads as a white-knuckled attempt to contain sorrow. In the latter, the white space feels as unpredictable as sorrow itself. The blank page here is where we sense ghosts: a distinct presence that is empty, an embodied form of nothingness.
The emptiness vibrates before the poems even begin. Prior to the first section, Nguyen has placed what, at first glance, appears to be a gray-scaled page. At the top corner of this gray-scale is a slip of white space—the vague outline of a body. The page is an epigraph that the reader does not yet have the tools to decipher.
We discover the shape’s origins upon entering the book. Throughout the collection, Nguyen includes family photos from which one member—the speaker’s late brother—has been carefully outlined and cut out. The shape of his excised body ghosts throughout the poems, sometimes cutting through the text, sometimes containing it. In one section, titled “Gyotaku” after the traditional Japanese method of printing fish, multiple impressions of the brother build on and cover each other, making the text illegible. Nguyen includes various shapes made of words, words missing shapes, blurred imagery, blurred text, and collage. The same family photos recur throughout but with subtle changes in clarity and exposure. Sometimes there is no white space but around the photos, with Nguyen superimposing text on top of the images. Elsewhere, white space slashes through dense blocks of text. Whenever the speaker seems to be in the repetitive act of self-soothing, as the larger blocks of text often read, grief rushes in to break the incantation. Sometimes, the white space is the absence of the brother and sometimes the flood of his presence. Always, the white space shifts around the text, around the images, shoving and obliterating it unpredictably.
In an interview with Breakwater Review, Tyehimba Jess said that “at its best poetry is always an experiment.” Ghost Of has been compared to Jess’s Olio for the ways in which both books require that the reader interact with them physically. While Olio has interactive elements like fold-out pages, its varying text sizes and visual elements are similar to those in Ghost Of insofar as they demand a physical alertness from the reader. Nguyen’s book feels populated not so much by “experimental” poetry as by poetry that is shaped by suffering; the poems are the exact shape they have to be to accommodate, and attempt to bear, the weight of tragedy. Trying to read some of the passages in Ghost Of requires turning the book clockwise, squinting to try and read smaller text, and occasionally relenting when the words crawl over each other. The impulse to decode the text mimics the sensation of managing grief. Deciphering those portions can feel like trying to decipher messages from the dead, or trying to decipher our own longing now that they’re gone.
One of the most compelling aspects about this elegy is the dispensation of melodrama that so often accompanies great pain. Nguyen’s book is a bare recounting of the experience of grief more than the circumstances that led to it. It reads like cartography, with the speaker mapping a territory that keeps reshaping itself. The poems are not attempts toward healing so much as attempts to be rigorously honest about the experience of trying to heal but failing, thinking one is healed only for the wound again to start oozing. The poems are full of exiles and evacuations, both actual (a family evacuated from Saigon) and metaphorical (a “lyric out of sync / with melody”). Despite the constant departures, there is no escape from grief, only a constant running. As she writes in “Exodus”:
Maybe you’d forget
why you were here, that you
didn’t belong,
that just because it was like life,
didn’t mean it could be life,
that you could come back to life
but not return to living.
And if you bypassed a war, a war
wouldn’t bypass you
Here, Nguyen exempts a final period, with the Vietnam War still chasing her family, herself, reminding the reader that a country’s history and a family’s history and an individual’s history are intricately and inextricably bound. Her language here is pared down, predominantly monosyllabic, but moving across the page frenetically. This tension engages the private experience alongside the public, a personal tragedy in concert with an intergenerational one. Like the morphing, blurring family photos, the poems become palimpsests; the white space encroaches rather than relieves. Quotidian items take on new, unshakable significance—the “ashes of incense” can never again be simply a way to perfume a room, “ID cards, contracts, permits, deeds” and other documents we use to “be certain of each other” become hollow, vaguely ridiculous.
I am tempted not to excerpt as much as I often might from a collection because the cumulative effect of this book is so important to its power. How can I excerpt the parts of this book that seem to be happening just outside the corner of your vision? How can I excerpt the physical outline of the lost brother, who moves through the pages, such that the reader begins searching for him everywhere, even after closing the book and setting it down?
A true story: While I was reading this book, I had a houseguest. She picked up Ghost Of from my coffee table and started flipping through it while I brewed coffee. By the time I returned just moments later, she’d read only one stanza and was openly weeping. She read it aloud to me:
I dreamed last night, my mother says,
that you were in danger and your brother was young still,
though you were the same
as you are now.
He was looking for me and I was looking for you.
So much of the genius of this book is also in the candor of moments like this one. Nguyen is not hiding behind the poems. She isn’t looking to escape grief, though she writes “I’m ready to feel better.” On the very next page, though, she avows that “I must not be consoled.” Such is the truth of trauma—it shifts and, in shifting, shapes our lives, moment to moment. Nguyen is not attempting to control that shifting but rather acknowledge its power. The book can feel like a private exercise, as if we are watching the speaker’s effort toward accommodating the shapes loss carves into her life. It is as if, at times, we are not even her reader, that the book would exist without our gaze. If the reader is compelled, as I was, to reread the book immediately after finishing, you will be returned to the initial gray-scaled page, the outline of the brother emptying its top corner. There I found that the page wasn’t gray-scaled after all, but populated with one tiny, pale name printed over and over again: Oliver.
