A review by jayisreading
Root Fractures: Poems by Diana Khoi Nguyen

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

A powerful poetry collection, Diana Khoi Nguyen dives into her roots and the fractures that exist in one’s memory and sense of self. Nguyen focuses on the reverberations of trauma, her brother’s suicide, war, and colonization, a lot of it a reflection on how they impacted her and her family, but she also explores the ways in which these themes also affected the Vietnamese diaspora. I think what was particularly powerful about this collection was the interspersed visual media, some of which are entirely in verse. It was especially impactful to see the words fill the cutout spaces in photos, often that empty space being where her brother should be.

As I’m not Vietnamese, there were some aspects of the poems that I did not fully understand, notably whenever Nguyen wrote explicitly in her language (e.g., the first poem of the collection is entirely in Vietnamese). I did ask a Vietnamese friend for some help with getting through this collection, and their insights were incredibly helpful in contextualizing where Nguyen was coming from.
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