{"id":21181,"date":"2022-11-09T17:55:02","date_gmt":"2022-11-09T22:55:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=21181"},"modified":"2023-05-24T15:30:44","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T19:30:44","slug":"her-kind-ghost-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2022\/11\/09\/her-kind-ghost-of\/","title":{"rendered":"her kind: ghost of"},"content":{"rendered":"

ghost of: diana khoi-nguyen<\/h1>\n

\u201cThere is no ecologically safe way to mourn.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Diana Khoi Nguyen begins her poetry collection, Ghost Of<\/em>. The book, a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the weight of grief through the loss of her brother. Nguyen captures the cyclic nature of life and grief with grace. Terrance Hayes describes it as \u201csteeped in the poetics of exile and elegy.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is one of my favorite poetry collections of all time. It\u2019s a brilliant book with visceral imagery, imaginative poetic structures, and threads that tie the whole collection together beautifully.<\/p>\n

The way Nguyen\u2019s titles her poems \u00a0this: Overture, Reprise, and Coda illustrate the collection\u2019s ties to music and sound on a fundamental level. In the foreground, imagery like \u201cpattering rain,\u201d \u201cneighbors upstairs spilling rice across the floor,\u201d and \u201can alarm goes off\u201d create an aural awareness in the reader. Ideas of music are pursued further in lines such as:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat may exist between appearance and disappearance, between sound and silence, as something that is nearly nothing\u2014slow music, quiet music, spare music\u2014 of sound and form I fell asleep tonight\u201d (Triptych)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cHarps strung with gut still make music after 2,000 years.\u201d (Future Self)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And perhaps a core line of the whole collection, as well as one of my favorites:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is nothing that is not music, the pouring of water from one receptacle into another\u201d (Triptych)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"Nguyen uses the poems titled Triptych and Gyotaku to experiment with form\u2014there are three of each. Gyotaku is a traditional Japanese method of printing fish that dates back to the mid-1800s. The Gyotaku poems vary widely in how they’re arranged, but I chose the one below because I love its simple elegance\u2014and again, there are themes of sound and music present. Nguyen’s poems sound and feel like music themselves; in this collection, each poem is its own brief elegy. You can see an example of it off to the side, and a sample of her take on the art form below.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

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The Triptych poems take up three pages: one is a family photograph where her brother has been cut out, the second fills the negative space of her brother with a poem, and the third fills out the positive space a poem, almost like a frame. Her use of form paints negative space so vividly, along with the sensation of absence. You can see how the poems are laid out below:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\" \"\" \"\"<\/p>\n

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I hope these poems brought a bit of inspiration into your week, regardless of your artistic medium; Nguyen so deftly shows us how closely intertwined artistic disciplines can be. I encourage you to view her poems on Poetry Foundation if you’ve enjoyed this brief look at her work. As always, thanks for reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ghost of: diana khoi-nguyen \u201cThere is no ecologically safe way to mourn.\u201d Diana Khoi Nguyen begins her poetry collection, Ghost Of. The book, a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the weight of grief through the loss of her brother. Nguyen captures the cyclic nature of life and grief with grace. Terrance Hayes describes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2262,"featured_media":20955,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2038],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21181"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21181"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21205,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21181\/revisions\/21205"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}