Diana Khoi Nguyen, Root Fractures

 

A girl dug a hole at the beach, sent her siblings to fetch water.

She found pleasure in it. All things fall down, or want to,
so she dug and dug, her trowel falling deeper, the earth growing darker.

She thought in concentric circles, the tides coming
and going, overlapping each other. When she poured water in,
the hole filled up, then emptied, its walls caved in. She began again.
If she could have, she would have dug a hole every day, one
beside the other, then another, and another. A hole is a hole,
but none of them are the same.

Along a shore, no one can know how many holes there are.

Along a shore, no one can know which holes are hers. (“A Story About Holes”)

Struck immediately by Pittsburgh-based poet Diana Khoi Nguyen’s stunning full-length debut, Ghost Of (Omnidawn, 2018) [see my review of such here], I was pleased to hear of her follow-up collection, Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024). Nguyen writes of connection and disconnection, breaks and attempts into healing. “my work inspires mother to write poems I will inherit from her,” she writes, to open one of the short lyric “Cape Disappointment” poems, a title that repeats throughout the collection, “tears on the page denature like egg whites [.]” Root Fractures is a collection that explores and expands upon slow and eventual loss, of fracturing itself, from her parents leaving Vietnam to the death of her brother, and how deeply that loss permeates every aspect of the remaining family structure. Through sharp lyrics, she examines the breaks, and their ongoing outcomes across years, across generations. These are poems with a gravitational pull, one that highlights loss and disappearance, and the grief that can’t help but rush to occupy those absences. The sequence “A Story About Holes,” one of the anchors of the collection, offers: “This is a story about two particles. They are travelling near / an event horizon. Life at the edge can be particular. One / of the pair falls in with a negative valence / which sucks out energy from the black hole. // The other particle, its counterpoint, escapes with positive energy. / No one knows how.” Nguyen offers an evocative expanse and stretch of detail, akin to a constellation, from how her parents first met to the shadow of war that forced them to leave, through to the multiple ways her brother worked to remove himself from the family landscape, until he finally did, becoming that absence that couldn’t help but outline for those who remained. In portraits, how he become shadow, a text that is perpetually erased and rewritten, held in place. “open the window to erase your ghost or maybe let one in,” another “Cape Disappointment” poem offers, furthering Nguyen’s occasional repeat set akin to short asides from the main narrative threads of the collection, “I unlatch like a cello case, air filling every dent in the velvet [.]”