There comes a time for separation, and let us hope it is neither too early nor too late. Nothing split fits back the same, but I don’t want things the way they were. Perhaps a single moment of light in the family could reveal the past to have been illusion.
From “Đổi Mới”
Diana Khoi Nguyen’s sophomore collection, Root Fractures, is a fraught and aching collection that explores the dynamics of a family coming to terms with suicide. The poems lay bare the generational trauma at the heart of a Vietnamese family. Nguyen explores the lasting impact of war and the rage that passes from one generation to the next, much of it from the perspective of a speaker who is intentionally estranged from her mother, a desperate attempt to break the cycle before it’s too late. Root Fractures is a master class in technique, from the way Nguyen moves fluidly between languages to her use of mixed media to confront the loss of her brother.
Nguyen pays close attention to structure and arrangement throughout the collection, which is separated into five sections. Within each section, Nguyen repeats several poem titles: “Cape Disappointment,” “Misinformation,” and Đổi Mới. The first and second sections also begin with parallel poems, the first in Vietnamese and the second in English, which follow a prompt indicated by the title, “Write a paragraph about your family.” The third section then begins with an erasure of the English version. All but the second section include poems referencing fracture; the first section contains a poem titled “Notes on the Fractures,” while the third, fourth, and fifth sections all contain poems titled “Root Fracture.”
Nguyen’s attention to repetition and cyclicity help to reinforce major themes in the book, as well as her metaphor of “Kintsugi, the art of putting pieces back together but lining the cracks in gold so as to illuminate what once was broken,” an apt description for the author’s approach to the mining of memory and lineage throughout the collection. That lineage is at the epicenter of the collection, which opens by outlining the speaker’s nuclear family:
At the moment, my family is American.
We are four people, not five.
My father and mother were Vietnamese in 1975.
…
They have three children,
two girls and one boy.
The eldest daughter is a writer,
the younger daughter works in a hospital.
The younger son has died.
Though Nguyen continually demonstrates her lyrical ability, these lines are simple and direct. The matter-of-fact tone contradicts the grief set up by her early reference to “four people, not five” and solidified in the explanation that “the younger son has died.” Her use of simple sentences adds a layer of acceptance to the collection, an important complement to the many poems that look to the past for answers.
The book includes numerous poems with the title “Đổi Mới,” a phrase which translates literally to “innovation” or “renovation,” but often means “reformation.” The term comes from a set of policies meant to improve the Vietnamese economy a decade after reunification. All the “Đổi Mới” poems are prose poems which, together, tell the story of how the speaker’s mother and father met, as well as the fraught relationship between the speaker’s mother and grandmother. The prose is deeply reflective and lyrical, but haunting. In one block of text, the speaker admits, “When I was young, I wanted to be just like her,” only to close the following block with, “Each time I look into the mirror, I see you with your back turned toward me.” This series contextualizes the more experimental and sparse poems, complicating the relationship that stretches across three generations of women.
The core of the collection, of course, are the fractures. Nguyen is at her most experimental in the series of titular poems, all titled “Root Fracture.” These poems use mixed media and textual experimentation expertly as the speaker processes her brother’s suicide, as well as his decision to physically cut himself from family pictures before his death. The first “Root Fracture” poem includes a photograph with an overlay of text; the text itself is faded and sometimes difficult to read, mirroring the speaker’s inability to converse directly with her brother. The poem is a painful stream of consciousness in which the speaker wonders, “am I the hero or the monster perhaps I’m both perhaps you’re both both dead and alive alive in death present in the world as particle and particulate…I don’t know the way to you…can we be together again oblivious to all this…” The poem ends abruptly, the speaker telling her brother, “meet me in the middle in the white space we can,” a technique that again resists coherent resolution.
Root Fractures is a collection of nearly incomprehensible depth and innovation. Nguyen navigates prose with efficiency and precision, crafts poems into silhouettes, layers words and phrases that emphasize the frenetic and incoherent thoughts that accompany grief, and even creates an omnidirectional poem that takes on new meaning with every read. This is one of the most complex, intriguing collections in recent memory. But more than that, it is a tremendous investigation of suicide and its aftermath. I can’t recommend this collection enough.