Here I am Burn Me

Author: Kimberly Nguyen

Publisher: Write Bloody (2022)

In this stunningly tender poetry collection, Kimberly Nguyen’s lone voice reaches out into the void, extending an invitation to become part of her orbit. Time is an entanglement in Nguyen’s poetic galaxy. Past traumas snag the fabric of space and time, twisting the past and present together until they are undistinguishable from one another. Vivid and striking, Nguyen’s voice is sharp and precise, a needle that pinpoints time’s pulled threads and pulls them back through. Poem after poem, line after line, Nguyen expertly un-entangles the past and present, healing the space-time continuum and thus opens the possibility of a future free from its past wounds.

Nothing escapes Nguyen’s orbit unscathed. She dissects everything that passes by her and holds them to the light before setting them free. Nguyen confronts intergenerational trauma, a broken family, and her own heartbreak head-on, and she dives in again and again looking for and creating love amidst all the chaos. These poems hope. These poems yearn. These poems call out into the void aching to reach someone, anyone, to let them know, if they are out there, they are not alone here.

"For so many of us, pursuing the life we want, and finally loving ourselves for who we are and dream of being, means hurting and leaving behind those we care for most. Imagining a new world can seem more painful than putting up with the status quo or the silence in which increasingly frightening fears reside. How, then, might any of us find freedom? How might we achieve more for ourselves than survival? This debut poetry collection from Kimberly Nguyen is a meditation on these questions. With remarkable emotional intensity and intelligence, the speaker of these poems maps a journey from the loss and loneliness of being, for example, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees in America to the wonder and, of course, the wound of seeing herself anew, of changing her perception of her history and her world. Through poetic series that demonstrate the cyclical nature of recovery, and through poems about the making of poetry itself, Nguyen 'saw a shadow and shined a light on it' so that, eventually and inevitably, the reader can see 'your own face staring back.'"

–Paul Tran

"Poem / light me," Nguyen declares in this poetry collection, and indeed, each controlled line ignites a furnace within my heart. These poems of grief, diaspora, and self-reclamation serve as the landscape for the ingenious engines that Nguyen sets into motion: contrapuntals on eggs, satellite calls from different planets, and the nuisance of being chị hai. It is a pleasure to witness her poetic prowess as she writes a speaker that not only wrecked me, but also held and healed me. Towards the end, Nguyen states, 'It is done, and I am still here,' which is fitting, because with this book, Nguyen craters her mark on the landscape of contemporary poetry and Asian-American literature."

–Joshua Nguyen