Dust and Conscience

by Truong Tran

Poetry. Asian American Studies. "Truong Tran's work seems to me to be part of a literary undertaking that has both sociological and aesthetic implications. Along with writers like Pamela Lu and Renee Gladman, Tran is advancing the interrelated questions of narration, historiography, and identity and establishing something new in American culture as well as in American literature, DUST AND CONSCIENCE speaks of a cultural position that simultaneously and from the start resists both marginalization and assimilation. The refusal to be displaced or to be incorporated is at the heart of the genre-bending evident in the work—it explains why the writing is, and must be, simultaneously prose and poetry, story and lyric. Something extremely important is going on, something wonderful."—Lyn Hejinian

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 2002

About the author

Truong Tran is a poet and visual artist. His publications include The Book of Perceptions, Placing The Accents, dust and conscience (awarded the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Prize), within the margin, and Four Letter Words. Truong lives in San Francisco where he is currently teaching poetry at SFSU and Mills College.

Reviews

[L.J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

December 4, 2009
Dust and Conscience, by Truong Tran
In Dust and Conscience, Truong Tran uses no commas, dashes, colons, semi-colons, ellipses, quote marks, exclamation points, questions marks, or periods. In 85 pages of poems there is not a single punctuation mark. Each poem is written in a continuous mental breath, with line breaks falling where the rectangular block-shape imposes, rather than by the meters and rhythms that dictate lines in traditional verse.
The result is a perfect vehicle for the subjects of Dust and Conscience: family ties, cultural and sexual identity, and what it is to grow up a hyphenated-american, where one belongs fully to neither the original nor the transplanted home. Tran’s self-contained, prayer-bead-like poems defy the idea that verse must be controlled internally with commas to hobble and colons to bit and blind and periods to rein in. These poems, like a person contained within a set of outwardly imposed boundaries—for example four walls, an ethnicity, or a gender—do not harden and take the shape of their restriction, but instead remain free and fluxing like water; a thing that may take the shape of it’s container, but in its natural state holds no set form.
Ideally, poetic space is the rabbit hole or the looking glass through which we disappear for a time, forgetting that we are separate from what we are reading. It is lost time and place that leads to found time and place. The poetic space of Dust and Conscience explores the timely idea of what it is to live between divided places, times, philosophies, continents, sexes and cultures. It reminds us that sometimes we are not one thing or another but a being experiencing the journey between the two.
Tran achieves this feat not by drowning, pummeling, or alienating the reader with cultural references or trying to create an impossibly detailed picture, but by offering small, potent capsules that gradually stack, tile, and mosaic to form a series of windows through which we glimpse what it is to belong, and alternately what it is to be excluded:
or it will always be this way be it here or there yesterday or tomorrow us or them it
will always be this way you or i…

This is perhaps part of what Tran means when he comments that in his work, the empty space on the page means as much as the space that holds text: that mutual understanding versus uncertainty; home versus alienation; relationship versus isolation, are best understood when both the occupied and the empty are visible at once. Tran allows this duality to be experienced, not just when all the text has been read and the book has been closed—but while the book is still open, while the most recent image is still fresh, where the eyes can’t help but come to rest beyond the text into the place that isn’t the text. But the true beauty in Dust and Conscience is that it offers the reader a surprising discovery: that one is not simply defined by internal or external forces, but by yet another space from which we observe it all—a true home in the self.

Dust and Conscience
by Truong Tran (88 pages/Apogee Press 2002)
reviewed by LJ Moore email: editor.moore(at)gmail.com

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am always trying to branch out with my poetry choices, and spotted this at random on Open Library's site. Tran's revealing and thoughtful poetry is quite unlike any I have read; it is intensely contemporary, and eschews punctuation altogether. Some of my favourite fragments from his always unnamed poems are below:

- 'to preserve the bitterness he scattered his children in four directions sat back in his chair and proceeded to grow old'
- 'she sits in her new car she listens to the cd she is reminded of home she is overwhelmed with sadness she is parked in her garage she is reminded of home'
- 'so you i'm sure can understand it when i say that the world is nothing as i know it and yet i sit at this window as if i were there'

[Xuan · Rating 4 out of 5]

gotta think more on this as a whole but such pretty words and while sometimes frustrating, I think the lack of punctuation per poem creates this meta sense of the reader’s ability to form language and meaning depending on perceived punctuation and interpretation, like there are probably many ways to read each poem, which is a big theme in the collection so that was cool

[Jose Araguz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Could not put this book down! The book is a composed of a series of prose poems without punctuation. The stream of words forces you to engage with the words. Doing this blurs the stories, or, rather, shows how the stories in our lives - the meanings as well - layer and bleed into one another. Also, the poems keep a steady voice throughout and so it feels like one long, fleeting argument/meditation. A fine book of poems!

[pozharvgolovu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book. I haven't read Truong Tran before and it was a pleasant surprise. Polvo y conciencia is a quest for life, for language, for identity. And it has multiple endings, as it has various beginnings. Just like life: multiplicity means not a single straight answer, but the pleasure of the endeavor with all its possibilities. A must read.