We Play a Game [Minkštas viršelis]

The 112th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores the Vietnamese-American experience

The 112th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores the Vietnamese-American experience

Duy Doan is the 112th recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, America’s oldest continuing poetry award, which has honored the innovative work of talented young literary artists for nearly a century. Doan’s striking debut reveals the wide resonance of the collection's unassuming title, in poems that explore with abundant humor and a deeply felt reserve the ambiguities and tensions that mark our effort to know our histories, our loved ones, and ourselves. These are poems that draw from Doan’s experience as a Vietnamese-American while at the same time making a case for—and masterfully playing with—the fluidity of identity, history, and language. Nothing is alien to these poems: the Saigon of a mother’s dirge, the footballer Zinedine Zidane, an owl that “talks to his other self in the well”—all have a place in Doan’s far-reaching and intimately human art.