“What debts—monetary, emotional, filial—did my parents have that I’ve inherited?”

Poems and translations by Red, Lượng Trần, Vũ Anh Vũ & Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên

Poems and translations by Thu Uyên and Hương Trà

Poem and self-translation by Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên

When my mother and I were hopeless, buckling under the weight of our unanswered prayers, she taught me that laughter can be a way of creating our own mercy.

People talk about the dead sometimes having unfinished business with the living, but my case was the opposite.

We could only see Love if we did not look at it directly.

The author of Ghost Of on the importance of constraint, the page as a field, and facilitating findings among her students

What a royal feeling to look into that bag and imagine something new on my tongue on a day like that.

The sun sieves through the canopy— / rivers are relenting. My soul seats itself // for the first time. Where it is quiet, it becomes cold. / There is nothing I must do but die— // what joy to let go of all things—what ease to give up.

‘Sometimes you are damaged. You think poetry will repair you. You think poetry should repair you. You shake your fist at it when it doesn’t. You walk hand-in-hand with your damage, into the world. You do not speak. You are surprised when people register you are there.’

‘I told, my dear, I was living living living in the river. / I told, her then, I was dying dying dying not to shiver.’

Coming to terms with grief after the 2011 T?hoku earthquake and tsunami

“While a part of me was glad I wasn’t like my brother, no part of me wished to be more fortunate than my mother.”