jam alerts
by Linh Dinh
Poetry 146 pages
ISBN 978-0-925904-68-3
CHAX PRESS
Linh Dinh is one of the most consistently surprising writers around. One can find sources & roots for his writing, explain the traces of surrealism through the presence, say, of the French in Vietnam (tho they were driven out a decade before he was born), note that he is hardly the only good or successful Vietnamese American poet, let alone the only poet to come from a working class background, yet he is not writing “about” or even “toward” nor “from” any one of these contexts so much as he is through them – they are lenses, filters, that condition his perspective on everyday life. Imagine what any other poet with this strong a sense of form would have had to become in order to write such poetry. Ted Berrigan, for example. Berrigan shares Linh’s class background, which enables him to be as ruthless in a different way as Linh is in his. But the comparison stops there. Linh is writing straightforward poetry, but from a perspective shared by almost no one else. This kind of exile is far deeper than mere geography. Reading Borderless Bodies, you can feel Linh’s deep loneliness on every page & realize that there are aspects of his poetry that you can’t find anywhere else. We probably haven’t had a writer this singular since the death of William Burroughs.
Ron Silliman
Linh Dinh is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004), and three previous books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (2003), American Tatts (2005) and Borderless Bodies (2006). His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present (2003). and Three Vietnamese Poets (2001). He is also the editor of Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (2001).