We Play a Game (Volume 112)

Yale Series of Younger Poets

by Duy Doan, Carl Phillips (Foreword)

The 112th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores the Vietnamese-American experience
 
Duy Doan’s striking debut reveals the wide resonance of the collection’s unassuming title, in poems that explore—now with abundant humor, now with 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 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.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Bisexual

104 pages, Paperback

First published March 20, 2018

Reviews

[Jenna]

You may say it's hard for a book to live up to a cover by the mind-blowingly talented visual artist Jess X. Snow, but I would argue that this book, the 2017 Yale Younger Poets Prize winner, does. I have never before seen such effective use of the pantoum form, for example: consider the poem "Duet" , in which the words "mantras," "our cries," "had me," and "came" undergo startling transformative shifts in meaning between the first stanza and the last. Also, I admire how, when dealing with the subject of families, Doan manifests a refreshing unsentimentality, a toothed truthfulness, with a real bite to it:

"Em--
I had a younger
brother, I had dominion over him. Em--
I had a younger sister,
I hardly ever looked at her.

Getting hit
never made us
any closer." (from "First-Person Plural")

"Crayola," a poem about a devout Catholic family that discovers an abandoned statue of the Virgin Mary and "resurrects" it on their front lawn, further develops this theme:

"One of my sisters
watering the lawn once clumsy put the sprinkler

too near the pedestal and the spouting water found its way
just beyond the glitter of Mary's fringes and lit up bits of sky

before an abrupt cupping sound the height of my sister's head

which was the sound of my mother's palm creating suction
out of my sister's ear"

There is an intentional stolidity to the narrative style in this one poem, heavy with noun phrases and light on punctuation, that makes the violent denouement especially affecting. Few poetry books I've read recently explore the complexity of sibling relationships this pointedly.

"T-o-u-r-b-i-l-l-o-n. The word that eliminated me from the 6th grade spelling bee.... Jonathan Stroud afterwards mocked me for getting the word wrong: How many l's does it have? I wanted to smack him upside the head using the same keychain my father used on me. My uncle used cigarette tobacco to stop the bleeding. How could I make something like that up?" (from "Wristwatch")

(People: as a society, we need to talk about things like this, tell and retell stories like this one. It is neither disloyal nor ungenerous. Maxine Hong Kingston was right: when they "tell us not to tell, what they really mean is 'Tell.'")

It is Doan's refusal to gloze or romanticize or turn a polite blind eye that makes this book's moments of lyricism feel truly earned. Consider, for example, this gorgeous passage about something as seemingly mundane as a selfie, of all things:

"I tried to take a selfie of us once but goofed the whole thing.

'Hold the river closer, Narcissus,'
she told me. 'Hold the river closer.'" (from "Love Trinkets")

Or this simile, so closely observed and carefully held in the mind:

"You're the inverted foot that starts a line:
that start of a climb that
begins with falling." (from "Another Way of Explaining It")

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book well deserves its finalist status in the category of bisexual poetry in this year's Lambda Literary Awards. The poet is very skillful, and the poetry is bi without shouting "I'm bi!" Just an alternation of pronouns here and there makes it clear the poet isn't censoring his sexual identity. I enjoyed the traditional forms as well as the less recognizably structured poems. Though the poems dealt with emotional topics like children getting hit with chains by their parents, and I was quite convinced of the author's competence, the poems still left me a bit cold. Perhaps that was just because of the determined lack of sentimentality in the writing that another reader here has noted.

The book makes a good double-feature read with another finalist in the same category and contest whose immigrant author deals with similar topics, including bisexual feelings, the first-generation immigrant experience, and getting hit by parents: Cenzontle by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, whose poems were a little less gnomic and to me seemed more lyrical and emotional.

[november · Rating 2 out of 5]

⟢ "In the pink light, I'm drunk with the moon, chock-full of poems..."
I enjoyed the poems in the beginning of this collection more than I did the middle and end. I thought there was some beautiful imagery throughout. However, I think the theme and message of the individual poems were too sporadic and not well connected so it had me feeling a bit lost as I read. I also did not resonate with the religious and sports (?) tones that came along in some of the poems.

[Tori Baker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good poems. Favorites were "from the provinces," "romanticizing vietnam," "duet," "mercedes out front," "post-mortem habits with my little brother," and "soccer." I didn't understand all of them but the ones I did I liked.

[jo :-) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The repetition!! The changed meanings!!

Shoutout bilingual and bisexual poetry

The religious and soccer references for sure went over my head but otherwise really cool stuff

The poems about his bà ngoại ☹️☹️☹️

Thinking about having to have a body

[Luke Gorham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pleasantly heady and playful with language, but too inconsistent to be fully embraced. Needed shorn. Will glady read Doan's next collection.

[Elliot · Rating 2 out of 5]

A really solid collection of poetry with a strong focus on the experience of being Vietnamese-American. Lyrical and surreal, just not really to my taste.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

"One lover was kind, so kind, in kissing me at all."