By Emily Velasquez
Born in Oakland, CA, Vietnamese American poet Phuong T. Vuong won Red Hen Press’s Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award in 2021 for her collection, A Plucked Zither. In this work of poetry, Vuong unbinds what gets lost while carrying the aftermath from Vietnamese voices that have been longing to breathe after the disruption from wars, migration, and silence. In other words, through the trajectory of these poems, Vuong’s speaker processes and dwells on the migrant’s emotional experience. These poems cross paths with images on how migration distances mothers from their children and how that separation creates not only a familial distance, but an origin distance from a migrant’s birth land.
In each section of Vuong’s collection, the speaker’s voice grieves when recalling memories of parents, grandparents, a lineage that exists as an echo that weaves in this new language on post-migration and the effect it has on the children of migrants. As the collection moves forward, Vuong reveals glimpses of those memories, most carefully in her poem, “On Generational Memory:”
One doesn’t remember the burning
home, but the women who look like our mothers
sliced and penetrated, their scarlet shapes.
Instead of capturing a generalization of a war’s aftermath, Vuong points to specific images that return and rewind memory. She leads us through the “burning home” where each line is undressing the layers of what happened in those burning homes and Vuong moves the lens close enough that these women and mothers become the memory. A Plucked Zither implores its reader to absorb the intersections between past and present voices trying to embody a sound of memory to heal and harmonize what existed or was claimed to exist. The closing poem, entitled “Grandmother Says: New Theorems” appears with a visible split down the middle of the poem, as if it were broken to mirror its half. What is delightful in that division are the two stanzas placed in the middle of that space. Vuong reshapes the emotions that are in transition and unloads them in this schism, where the speaker finally reaches towards this hope in the lines, “I know this as I know we stay alive so / I cross into you, where I’ve always lived.”
In Vuong’s A Plucked Zither, she constructs a window through which we can see what has been left out when generational memory seeps into the earth, into our tongue when it becomes the narrator, the song of what is left and gone.
A Plucked Zither is available from 27th Letter Books, Bookshop, Elliott Bay Book Company, Garden District Book Shop, Talking Leaves Books, and Waucoma Bookstore.
Emily Velasquez is a poet who loves anything about food and cooking. Born and raised in Santa Ana, she received her B.A. in English from California State University Fullerton. She is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University.