Looking and Seeing / Seeing and Looking

Authors: Truong Tran and Damon Potter

Publisher: Omnidawn (2023)

This book brings together different perspectives under two titles, considering the lives and experiences of two friends, one Vietnamese American and one white. Looking And Seeing is a poetic work of yearning, regret, and righteous indignation. In Truong Tran’s poetry, what is said and what is written reveal our complexities. Composed as an investigation of his own being and body as a brown person moving through white spaces, this collection moves alongside Tran’s friend and collaborator Damon Potter. Seeing and Looking offers a record of Potter’s perspective as a white man examining who he is and wants to be and the complications of trying to be good while also benefiting from histories of oppression. Potter considers death—both his own future death and the deaths of his friends—while grappling with how to witness horrors, wonders, and his self.