Finalist, National Book Awards 2018 for Poetry

National Book Awards

"A death creates both an absence—the hole left by the departed—and a presence—the weight of that hole. Nguyen’s beautiful debut collection, Ghost Of, finds myriad ways to embody this seeming paradox. . . . The collection’s story is ultimately not just of a sister’s grief, but of a family’s, of broad loss born from the Vietnam war and deep loss born from suicide. The book’s wildly inventive forms show the power struggle anyone who has experienced great loss can understand: the attempt to find a suitable container for mourning, and the acceptance that mourning dictates the shape of everything around it."

RHINO

"Ghost Of is truly a brilliant book. Amazing poetry happens inside visual innovations where 'There is nothing that is not music, the pouring of water from one receptacle into another, a coat of bees draped over the sack of sugar caving in on itself.' Poetry is found in the gaps, silences and ruptures of history. In 'An Empty House Is a Debt,' the poet writes: 'There is a house in me. It is empty. I empty it. / Negative space: the only native emptiness there is.' These poems mean to make a song of emptiness and the spaces we house. They sing to and for the ghosts of identity, exile, and history. They sing like a ghost who looks from the window or waits by the door. Lyric fills in the holes in the story. Ghost Of is unforgettable."
 

Terrance Hayes | From the Foreword

"Nguyen’s Ghost Of is nothing short of an extraordinary debut. At its center is the haunting disappearance of a brother, gone by suicide. These poems are uncanny renderings of an invisibility made visible by the sheer will of candor, bemused forms, agility of lexicon, and a voice, almost noiselessly extravagant. What she gives us, she takes away; nearly impossible transformations transform. 'Something keeps not happening,' she writes. And then she causes it to happen in a language of grief—bold and often colder than most daring, exquisite acts. Nguyen’s voice is both wraithlike and astonishingly frontal; this is one of the most gifted first books I’ve read."

Lucie Brock-Broido

"Across these pages, sound makes shapes that, in turn, shape sounds, creating a complex weave in which absence figures as vividly as presence, and in which the absent are, in fact, present—in the faces so neatly cut out of the photographs . . . a haunting tribute to those we always carry with us, Nguyen’s stunning first collection explores the layered losses of displacement, migration, and death in ways that take full responsibility for the particularity of each individual’s experience. Written with equal parts frankness and compassion, the book radiates a very human generosity throughout."

Cole Swensen

"Nguyen’s Ghost Of is an astonishing scrapbook of lyric poems and photos where the central muse—her brother—is violently cut out. Poems are shaped into his silhouette as if Nguyen is trying to anatomize his tragic absence with pained and urgent remembrance. Nguyen writes with haunted precision and wondrous innovation. Ghost Of breaks my heart."

Cathy Park Hong