A review of Diana Khoi Nguyen's 'Ghost Of'
Part archive, part elegy, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection of poetry, Ghost Of, presents the haunting portrait of a grieving family set against a backdrop of intergenerational trauma. Written four years after the poet’s brother took his own life, Nguyen’s poems register this loss as it is refracted through the story of her parents’ immigration to the US as refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War.
Mark Nowak and the strategic inexpert stance
Jules Boykoff
Mark Nowak is, as he puts it, a practitioner of “an anticapitalist poetics of/upon American empire” (240). He’s the author of three poetry collections—Revenants (2000), Shut Up Shut Down (2004), and Coal Mountain Elementary (2009)—all from Coffee House Press.
Though not formally trained as either a playwright or a labor historian, Nowak has embarked into those specialized terrains as an inquisitive, rigorous poet. To be sure, Mark may well resist this oversimple categorization as a poet—despite holding an MFA and publishing widely in the field of poetry—as it could pigeonhole him in poetry circles whereas he works regularly in labor history circles, speaking widely at labor-history conferences and events.