Diana Khoi Nguyen and Cindy Juyoung Ok at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes DIANA KHOI NGUYEN—award-winning author of Ghost Of—and CINDY JUYOUNG OK—winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize—for a discussion of their new poetry collections Root Fractures and Ward Toward. They will be joined by SANDRA LIM—award-winning author of the poetry collections The Wilderness and The Curious Thing.

About Root Fractures

In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen excavates the moments of rupture in a family: a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to begin anew blend with visitations from the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after a disaster and how we can make a story out of the broken pieces of our lives.

As Terrance Hayes writes, “‘There is nothing that is not music’ for this poet. Poetry is found in the gaps, silences, and ruptures of history.” This astonishing second collection renders poetry into an act of kintsugi, embellishing what is broken in a family’s legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.

Praise for Root Fractures

“In Root Fractures, we come face-to-face with a dark gravitational pull, the great black hole of war. Through the Vietnamese American experience, Diana Khoi Nguyen languages a feeling many of us can relate to, so often buried, silent and deep, within land, blood, bone, into molecular DNA . . . As they ‘illuminate what once was broken,’ each of these poems glimmers and pulses along a pathway out—not for one person alone, but as enduring starlight, for generations to come.” —Layli Long Soldier, author of Whereas

“When I say that Diana Khoi Nguyen’s work is deeply moving and unsettling, I mean that her words move and unsettle ideas about diaspora, identity, and loss in startling and gorgeous ways. I can’t get enough of this devastation.” —Beth Nguyen, author of Owner of a Lonely Heart

“In Diana Khoi Nguyen's beautiful and heartbreaking book, Root Fractures, the leaping imagistic declarative sentence becomes fractured and unreliable, as a way to parse and thread memories and feelings. Stacked to the sky, the declaratives become tenuous and subjunctive, leaning under the weight of family, history, and trauma from displacement and a brother's suicide.” —Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World

About Ward Toward

“There are places,” Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, “where shaking is expected, loss is / assumed.”

In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces—from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. She plumbs these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of each reality’s language, word to word, as she uncovers fractured private codes and shares them in argument, song, and prayer.

Using visual play in invented forms, Ok counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person’s character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. The poems disrupt expectation with the comedy of institutionalized teens, nostalgia after the climate crisis, tenderness in a nursing home, and the wholeness of faltering Englishes. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok’s resolute, energized debut shifts language’s fissures to reassemble them into a new place of belonging.

Praise for Ward Toward

“Ward Toward is a piercing debut: a startle, a fissioning. These poems fragment, cleave and cluster, seek new grammars, strategize not for cohesion but proximity, convergence.” —Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations

“Reading Cindy Juyoung Ok’s poems is like witnessing the Big Bang in close-up slow motion—infinite collisions of syntax, thought and emotion—pyrotechnic and glorious. This debut volume spectacularly showcases an utterly singular poetic sensibility.” —Monica Youn, author of From From

“A delectable, scintillating read that leaps long into strangely elegant foray. In the dwelled, survived, and warded world, this poetic is utterly remarkable and calls for a rainstorm of awards.” —Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, author of Look at This Blue

Masking Policy

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.