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Book Review: Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Diana Khoi Nguyen is a multimedia artist and award-winning poet whose work has appeared widely in literary journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, PEN America, and The Iowa Review, among others.
She recently won the 92Y's Discovery / Boston Review 2017 Poetry Contest and the Omnidawn Open Book Contest. She has also received awards, scholarships, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Key West Literary Seminars, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and Bucknell University. Currently, she lives in Denver where she is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Denver. She teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop and in the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. |
Review
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A Review of Diana Khoi Nguyen's Ghost Of
Ghost Of is an echo of loss, exile, and coping with a devastating death. Diana Khoi Nguyen is “like a blacksmith, pushing… dark matter into the fire,” welding the shape of her brother into the empty spaces of glass-framed photographs. Through this confessional poetry, Nguyen asserts herself as the speaker and attempts to navigate through the gaps her brother Oliver tore out from old family snapshots before tearing out his own existence via suicide. She fuses together the elements of shape and ekphrastic poetry to invite conversation with her brother, only to receive “answers from the morgue.” Ghost Of is a tripartite composition that is divided into parts One, Two, and Three. The bridge between matter-of-fact and melancholia is built in Nguyen’s opening poem, “A Bird in Chile, and Elsewhere.” Nguyen wastes no time jarring her audience, stating, “There is no ecologically safe way to mourn.” Part One comes shortly after and consists of poems honing in on Nguyen’s self-reflection and lamentation. “Triptych” is the first of ten instances where Nguyen presents the blurred pictures of her past whilst commemorating her brother’s missing silhouette by filling his outline with text. In “I Keep Getting Things Wrong,” Nguyen illustrates a parallel between two disorienting experiences: her Vietnamese parents’ journey to America and a sibling’s suicide. “The Exodus” mirrors the same sentiments of a family becoming displaced and dysfunctional once “the monks came / to usher my brother out of the realm of the living”: Maybe you’d forget The structure of “The Exodus” imitates the bobbing motion of Nguyen’s “mother’s guised boat” and the precarious lull of emotions that follow the death of a loved one. She tries to stabilize the waves of sorrow in the recurring image “Triptych,” by repeating the mantra “it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it keeps me alive...” before shifting to part Two.
Part Two demonstrates Nguyen’s endeavor to reconcile with Oliver’s passing, which can be seen in the fourth appearance of “Triptych.” She produces another concrete poem that replicates the family photo. The white space of her brother’s ghost and an aside of words that embody the void exhibit Nguyen’s dilemma: “even among the living it seems a dream will never end; you are dead.” The conflicting feelings of guilt, anger, and confusion that accompany this epiphany are integrated within Nguyen’s clustered thoughts: I am glad that you are dead, I am glad that you are glad that you are I am glad that you are I am glad that you are I am glad that dead I am dead I am dead glad that you are glad dead glad that you are dead are you dead am I dead.. The enjambed lines laced with desperation along with Nguyen’s use of repetition demonstrate the reality of Oliver’s suicide. In the poem “An Empty House Is a Debt,” Nguyen reaffirms the transitory nature of human life through unembellished language and the insertion of line breaks that create a sense of fragmentation in her thought process:
When you love someone Nguyen addresses the unavoidable in a concise manner, edging away from elaborate descriptions that would otherwise romanticize mortality. Part Three serves as an epitaph for Oliver’s death. Poems such as “Gyotaku,” “Future Self,” and “Coda” express the acceptance Nguyen finally reaches at the end of her intricate and intimate collection Ghost Of. She invites readers to confront their own ghosts by reinventing their portraits as “not art but life” by the conclusion of the book. In “Reprise,” Nguyen’s penance transforms into absolution once she acknowledges the pain as a part of her identity:
His skin against the fabric where he died / He tore himself free… And in the aftermath the brother simply—flourished. The trees simply—bloomed… What is the end of the world like—are we pennants in a gale murmuring amongst ourselves—Of mere being: cilia and sinew—tell me that what we lost as collateral is also a gift. Nguyen inserts mini-elegies to fill the face of her deceased brother without mythologizing his existence. In doing so, she reverses Oliver’s self-inflicted erasure by “draw[ing] inside the body” of his pictorial and physical absence, and ultimately makes “a nest in each hollow, each separate space.” Ghost Of juxtaposes the positive space of written words and the negative space of her brother’s photographic cavity and, in turn, forms both a personal and universal framework for the stages of grief. Nguyen’s poetry is a séance that resurrects the ghosts that dwell in all of us.
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Patricia Damocles is the Assistant Managing Editor for Jet Fuel Review who is majoring in English Language & Literature with a minor in Creative Writing. What she strives to achieve as a Jet Fuel editor is to give passionate, aspiring writers a platform to express themselves. As someone who has had the opportunity to be published in a previous issue, she is aware of how empowering it is to have her voice acknowledged in the world of literature. In her free time, she enjoys reading poetry and short stories, and also making memories with her friends, family, and cats.
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