Reenactments

In Reenactments, poet Hai-Dang Phan explores the history, memory, and legacy of the Vietnam War from his vantage point as a second-generation Vietnamese American. Woven throughout the poems is a narrative of his family’s exodus from Vietnam that beautifully elucidates the American record of immigration, dislocation, inheritance, and ultimately hope. The poems are persuasively varied in their approach. The past and present, the remembered and imagined, all intersect at shifting angles, providing bold new perspectives. And, in a fresh move, Phan widens the lens, interspersing translations of several other contemporary Vietnamese poems to the mix. This subtle and moving debut is an important addition to the literature of immigration.

Hai-Dang Phan is a Vietnamese-American poet. His poems and translations have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, Best American Poetry 2016, New England Review, jubilat, Prelude, Waxwing, Asymptote, and other journals. The author of a previous chapbook, Small Wars (Convulsive Editions, 2016), his work has been recognized with the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, an Emerging Writers Award from New England Review/Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and an NEA Fellowship. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Grinnell College and lives in Des Moines, Iowa.