Primordial: Poems

by Mai Der Vang

Mai Der Vang’s poetry—lyrically insistent and visually compelling—constitutes a groundbreaking investigation into the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants. Primordial is a crucial turn to the ecological and generational impact of violence, a powerful and rousing meditation on climate, origin, and fate.

With profound and attentive care, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam. The saola looks like an antelope, with two long horns, and is related to wild cattle, though the saola has been placed in a genus of its own. Remarkably, the saola has only been known to the outside world since 1992, and sightings are so rare that it has now been more than a decade since the last known image of one was captured in a camera trap photo in 2013.

Primordial examines the saola’s relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival. Can a war-torn landscape and memory provide sanctuary, and what are the consequences for our climate, our origins, our ability to belong to a homeland? Written during a difficult pregnancy and postpartum period, Vang’s poems are urgent stays against extinction.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Nonfiction

162 pages, Paperback

Published March 4, 2025

Reviews

[Mai H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

National Poetry Month 2025 #4

As with most of my poetry reviews, some of these hit more than others. I love that this is a love letter to saola conservation, an animal I didn't know about until reading this collection. Let's do better. Big fan of the bracket style poetry.

rep: Hmong American

tw: racism

📖 Thank you to Goodreads and Graywolf Press

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this poetry collection focused on the author's Hmong identity and the endangered saola species. Vang used a timeline format for some of her poems which I had never seen before and found particularly interesting. Below is an excerpt from my favorite poem of the collection:

Death in Captivity, a Surrender
All captured saolas have died in captivity
with the exception of two released back into the forest.
Say to the saola: forgive us
in our pleas to love you, forgive that you
give us meaning.

Say to the saola: to die in captivity swells
your mystery, god-sworn to never
reveal the beauty inside.
...
A saola is wounded in the act of capture.
A saola grows ill in captivity.
A saola dies and takes this future with it.
Say to the saola: here is a basket
in which to gather snowlight,
here is a blanket made of prayer.

Say to the saola: here is an echo
of the human you've left behind.

[Ellie Gordon]

Went to her reading yesterday and read the full book today :)

Favorite part (page 133):
“Some days, I talk to dust bunnies on the theory of accumulation, a gathering of oneself to grow oneself, on years maturing slowly, napping this existence with fog between my toes.”

[Brittnay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won this book from a giveaway hosted here on Goodreads! So, shout out to Graywolf Press for hosting that giveaway and picking me!

Prior to reading this book, I had no idea of what exactly a soala was, however, I have learned that they are an adorable animal! They are extremely cute!

The writing and formatting of this book was beautiful! This book also discusses the hardships and injustices that the Hmong people have faced. Overall, this book was very interesting and artistic. I really enjoyed reading it!

[Jo Rootkevitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grateful for the Graywolf Galley Club to receive an ARC!

A beautiful & tragic journey of Hmong individuals and communities paralleled with the critically endangered saola, an animal similar to an antelope (pictured on cover). Generational trauma is a complex topic that is artfully and creatively explored in these poems starting with the origins to the ripples that haunt people today.

This is the first collection I’ve read by Mai Der Vang and I’m excited to read her previous work!

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous poetry book that I read on commutes that focuses on being the last of something and how it overlaps with the author’s pregnancy. Comes out this winter, highly recommended.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

You were gone
before I could feed the wind, left me climbing

in all directions without an offering
of purple corn. I come to you

as the animal who wants to be found,
a bowl for a place to fit your

nested head. I swear not to rush the life
where you come back to dream.

I’ll wake and wait all night
if that’s what the sleeping takes.

Centered on the saola, a species of antelope in Laos and Vietnam, that was just named and discovered in my lifetime, and rare and unable to be kept in captivity and the author weaves the story of her Hmong people and their plight through war and displacement into the fabric of the fight to keep the earth alive, the saola alive, us humans alive. So beautiful and necessary.

excerpts

I UNDERSTAND THIS LIGHT TO BE MY HOME

In the awareness, I am brought closer
to my being from long before. In my

awareness, there is only what I can take
from small spaces of knowing,

an earnest ascendence imparted
by way of transmissions from the grid,
a voice calls unbroken below and above
as the aura of faraway light.

There is a light that
shimmers so deep it never goes anywhere.

Light assumes its job is to shimmer, and so it is,
but beyond that, light is ancestral.
Light is witness. Light is prehistory,

blueprint of vibrations shifting through
all directions of time.
…
Consider then the pain of leaving
this light, of losing the stars to spaces

no longer lit by its truth.

I am shaped in spaces where light does
not reach, a need for what does not

shimmer but opening to the shadow
to receive just as much light.

I miss this light always.
That is my one true wish,

as I know and
understand this light
to be my home,

as a knowing up there
in the galaxy is me,

and I am up there
in my bones built from stars.

TAKE TO THE DAYS A FIST OF STARLIGHT

Forward and forging within, I learn to fall singular,
merge fullness of every flame

after posthumous flame,

ever inundated by a world so ample
in its need to be emptied,

so abundant in all of its absence.
…
I take less from knowing

and more from melding these days
a new theology for love,

a personal cathedral, songs of our shared scarcity.

FOREST OF BEGINNINGS

Even the sky knows not
to make promises of water,

and the air knows not to dream of
the onset of rain.
…
This is the earth that opens like a room.

The ground sleeps through another
season of drought.

The land burrows further into exile,
sinking upward, heaven to the ground,

where bodies of hemlock and pine,
cedar and fir, no longer cast old roots

but tiptoe their arms around
shrubs and metal stakes.

Still, the land gives, the field grows,
the harvest enters when it is called.
Flora of these hills and meadows
are all but springing their desires
under the rising moon.

DEATH IN CAPTIVITY, A SURRENDER

All captured saolas have died in captivity
with the exception of two released back into the forest.

Say to the saola: forgive us in our plea to love you,
forgive that you give us meaning.
Say to the saola: to die in captivity swells your
mystery, god-sworn to never reveal the beauty inside.
…
Say to the saola: here is a basket in which to
gather snowlight, here is a blanket made of prayer.
Say to the saola: here is an echo of the human you’ve left behind.

[October Hill Magazine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review by Alexandra Cipriani, Book Reviewer at October Hill Magazine

With lyrical propensity and innovative visual form, Mai Der Vang's poetry collection Primordial: Poems delves into the essence of an endangered animal. Through preservation, culture, and exploitation, the poet delivers a message principally to the saola and its analogous existence with the erasure of the Hmong people, the devastation of Vietnam after the war, and what it all means for their descendents.

The saola, native to the Annamite Mountains between Laos and Vietnam, is a Bovidae creature with a reputation. It was the first large mammal to be found in fifty years by the Western world in 1992, and its last sighting was through a trap camera in 2013. The saola’s closeness to extinction and its exploitation are mirrored in Vang’s address on the issues of climate, genesis, and sustainment with pieces of poetry that play with the eyes—a convention of her work that I was captivated by...

Read the rest of the review in October Hill Magazine's Spring 2025 Issue

[Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Graywolf Press and NetGalley for sending me this ARC in exchange for review.

3.75 stars

Firstly I’d like to say thanks to the author Mai Der Vang for teaching me about the soala because they’re adorable and I had never heard of them prior to reading this.

Secondly the writing was so artistic and beautiful though really truly sad. The injustices and honestly racism the Hmong people have endured is so tragic and this dives into that hard “How do you translate: “fuck you” in Hmong, says your ten-year-old logic. Someone tags those words on the side of your house. Your parents are furious. You do not tell them what it means. You know it is the neighborhood kids, bored to blank, targeting your wall: with crosshairs of a spray can.” Treated as they’re not even human for absolutely no reason is disgraceful and disgusting and so upsetting. I hate how people can act towards others but this book is beautiful, not vengeful. It opened my eyes to the hate some people have survived through just for simply existing. And I do agree — it’s very lyrical.

Thank you! This makes me want to read more poetry.

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how Primordial moves, as a sequence and within the poems themselves, haltingly, lyrically, bitingly direct, and longingly or grieving all at once. I love how Mai Der Vang alludes to traditional forms by freely and stunningly tweaking them to her own needs and how she creates or plays with new forms; how their repetition across the collection adds to its intricate threading. The author brings home how personal the threat to species and the environment really is, and how in this case it is all tied to colonial exploitation, war, and displacement. The disappearance of a species (the Saola) is intimately connected to the threat to a people (the Hmong). They both go into hiding in their own ways. For what does discovery really mean under colonial circumstances; who does the "discovering," the observing, the counting? The poems' voice in some instances seems to dream of a time before distinctions, before formations. Primordial is so very beautiful in its music and longing.

[Laketony · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible introduction and exploration of the saola, a critically endangered animal in the mountain forests of southeast Asia, known as the Asian unicorn. The collection is an equally revealing and compelling exploration of the author's identity and Hmong ancestry.

The search for the saola---not seen in the wild since 2013---parallels the author's own search within her body, her lineage, and historical sources for anchor points of meaning and self-understanding. These meet in a confluence at the author's experiences with childbirth, which ground us in the animality of our bodies, tying the author closer to the saola and her Hmong ancestry.

Of special note, and truly deserving the 5 star reviews were the author's nonlinear poems that build layers upon a core sentence with new fragments, complexity, and truly beautiful imagery. They were stimulating and devastating to read.

[J.Istsfor Manity · Rating 3 out of 5]

A war happening in secret means the secret / is happening means the bag of rice / falls from an American chopper / in a storm of sand. / The bag rips apart. / The grains disperse to the floor.
— Mei Der Vang / “One Nation under Shadow Warfare” / Primordial

***

A saola is wounded in the act of capture.
A saola grows ill in captivity.
A saola dies and takes this future with it.
— Mai Der Vang / “Death in Captivity, a Surrender” / Primordial

***

What the wealthy would wage
to feast an unfamiliar creature is enough to shatter
an ecosystem into oblivion, is enough to defaunate the earth.
— Mai Der Vang / “Twelve Million Loops of Wire / Primordial

***

There is no such thing as new pain,
only the same pain recycled a hundred ways.
— Mai Der Vang / “Beast You Are Who Calls to the Beast I Am” / Primordial

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vang's work here is not interested in documentary poetics as her earlier collection Yellow Rain was, but it is a solid study of national and biological loss, tracking how the saola--indigenous to Laos and Vietnam--is endangered as a species and suffering all sorts of precarity. In the midst of this full-length study, Vang connects this precarity to the Hmong refugees, to the birth of a child, and to the willingness to by other national powers to extract native peoples and animals from their homeland. It's always fascinating and frequently a marvel of language and poetic delight, none more so than in the sequence "Origins" which runs at least 2 experiments of language that come together absolutely beautifully in the final page of that sequence.

[Brent Armendinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

From my introduction of Mai Der Vang's poetry reading at Pitzer College:

What does it mean to be kin? This, for me, is a central and urgent question that reverberates on every page of PRIMORDIAL. Vang writes, “For a human// to call out to a creature, part of/ the human must be creature, too.” What responsibilities for the lives of others, be they human or animal or plant or mineral, does this recognition require of us? What kind of kinship is created by exile? By unreachability? Addressing the saola, Vang writes, “I know the far away as a window through me as I know it to be cosmos in you.”

While deeply embedded in place, from the forests of the Annamite mountains to the walls and streets of Fresno, this book simultaneously expands what counts as place, what it means to be located and dislocated. And so Vang describes “leav[ing] the midnight,” “reach[ing] the return of a people,” “walk[ing] the hours inside my arms,” how “[c]louds cry out/ in the habitat of my mind,” and what it means to be “up there/ in my bones built from stars.”

In this intensely multivocal work, Vang weaves together multiple subjectivities to explore the possibilities and limits of kinship across time, distance, and species. She also exposes and upends official/imperial/racist/euphemistic narratives and troubles the violence of all kinds of taxonomy. She makes use of repetition and permutation to show the fissures inside of language, where “no lights no whispers” becomes “now light your whispers” and “a secret army” becomes “secret arm” becomes “secondary arms” becomes “secretions.” Through tremendous and varied formal experiments, Vang’s poems demand to be read in multiple ways. She disturbs grammar and its relation to empire, as when she asks, “Do you proxy? Do you American? Do you English? Do you [ancestor] or do you God?”

PRIMORDIAL is a crucial and astonishing book. Mai Der Vang’s poems are deeply awake to pain and possibility, to wonder and resistance. They offer both a guide and a challenge for the reader, too, to be awake and ultimately, to take responsibility.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

I have a great, abiding love and respect for the Hmong and their plight. I also love animals. This collection of poems discusses Hmong history, the refugee experience, and the saola, an animal is never heard of. Given that many folks have never heard of the Hmong, this felt apt as metaphor, as well as being interesting on its face.

I recommend this to poetry fans, animal lovers, and students of history alike.

[Shannon Heaton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful collection. 'Origin' was a mind-blower and her set of 'Node' poems sprinkled throughout the book were quite fun. Some difficult reads about extinction of a species and the memory of a people.

[Kaitlyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5 stars)
A gorgeous and brilliant collection that ties the endangerment of the saola (an indigenous species to Vietnam) to the trauma and displacement of Hmong individuals. This looks at how war impacts culture and the environment.

[William Bookman III]

This is just my style of writing. Lost in its own logic and making sense to a small fortunate few.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haunting.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another banger from Mai Der Vang. I enjoyed Yellow Rain, and this collection is just as good but in a totally different way.

[RYAN PHAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Huh. Interesting to draw parallels between Hmong people and the saola, since both are kind of hiding in the forest, are kind of endangered, and have not been treated well by their environment

[Killer Bee · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.72 overall rating. Interesting topic and structures

[Mella Dumali · Rating 3 out of 5]

quick read for a long travel

Light assumes its job is to shimmer, and so it is, but beyond that, light is ancestral. Light is witness. Light is prehistory, blueprint of vibrations shifting through all directions of time.