Nam Le at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes NAM LE—award-winning author of The Boat—for a discussion of his debut book of poetry 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. He will be joined in conversation by WYATT MASON—award-winning contributing writer at the The New York Times Magazine and translator of the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud.

About 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

In his first international release since the award-winning, best-selling The Boat, Nam Le delivers a shot across the bow with a book-length poem that honors every convention of diasporic literature—in a virtuosic array of forms and registers—before shattering the form itself.

In line with the works of Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, this book is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity—and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression, and historical trauma.

But it also means the violence of that assumption. Of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture, or language. And the complex violence—for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this—of language itself.

Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks, and camouflages, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilizing energy between the personal and the political. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.

Praise for 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

"Each poem in 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem stings as if Nam Le burned syllables onto the page with a pyrographic pen. These poems seethe and sing; they restlessly shapeshift as Nam Le tries to find a mode of speech or form that could capture the violent history of war and the experience of deracination. But the English language stops short and he captures that gap—and the unspeakable realms of racialized consciousness—with virtuousic and ineffable beauty." —Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

"With a cool outsider’s eye, Nam Le takes the English language to pieces and reassembles it with a virtuoso ease not seen since Finnegans Wake. There is wit aplenty, of a dancing, ironic kind, but the fury and the bitterness that underlie 36 Ways come without disguise, as do its moments of aching love and loss. Nam Le is a poet working at the height of his powers. Each of the poems comes with its own explosive charge; taken together, they are capable of shaking Western self-regard to its foundations." —J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Laureate 2003

"Exquisitely crafted fire bombs of incandescent rage. Moving and powerful." —Nick Cave

Masking Policy

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.