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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
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      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
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      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
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      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
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      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
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      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
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    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
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      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
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      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
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      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
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      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
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      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
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      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
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      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
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      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
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      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
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  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
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      • e Fall 2022
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Book Review: Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen

Ghost Of
Diana Khoi Nguyen
Omnidawn Publishing
2018
978-1-63243-052-6
83 pages
$17.95


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





















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
                 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.

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
more than you’ve ever known you could, it is
a good thing, except for the terrifying
 
realization that one day there comes
a parting.
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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  • Home
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022