"As she did in her 2018 debut
Ghost Of (a National Book Award finalist) Nguyen focuses on the Vietnamese diaspora and her brother's suicide. Wrenchingly, she includes family photos where he cut himself from the frame before his death: "His absence interrupts us," she writes."
--The New York Times Book Review "Diana Khoi Nguyen's Root Fractures builds from her lauded debut,
Ghost Of, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award winner and a finalist for the National Book Award with further investigations of family histories of grief and displacement. In this new collection, absence and omission evolve into a formidable sense of presence and narrative...I am already anticipating what comes next from her."
--Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub "Readers may remember Diana Khoi Nguyen's outstanding debut collection
Ghost Of most memorable for its family photo cut-out visual poems in its exploration of grief and migration...[and] bluntness... never hiding rough reality behind flowery words or romanticizing traumas in the diaspora... [In
Root Fractures] this quality returns...attached to a lighter touch, perhaps best illustrated by this thesis early in the book: "'In my country, ' my mother says, 'a child shows love by listening to her parents without questions.' But what if the parents are wrong?" This line... compelled me like no other; to dare to counter the dutiful nature of the immigrant daughter within the text of a poem, so succinctly and directly, then return to this question throughout yet another strong collection--more innovative work from Nguyen, in a different way than before."
--The Millions
