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Winter Phoenix: Testimonies in Verse
A profound debut collection blending testimony and tribunal, Winter Phoenix creates a courtroom for colonial and linguistic reckoning after the Vietnam war.
A book of testimonies in verse, Winter Phoenix is a collection of poems written loosely after the form of an international war crimes tribunal. The poet, a daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, navigates the epigenetics of trauma passed down, and across, the archives of war, dislocation, and witness, as she repeatedly asks, “Why did you just stand there and say nothing?” Here, the space of accusation becomes both lyric and machine, an “investigation” which takes place in the margins of martial law, the source material being soldiers’ testimonies given during three internationally publicized events, in this order—The Incident on Hill 192 (1966, Phù Mỹ District, Vietnam); The Winter Soldier Investigation (1971, Detroit, USA); and The Russell Tribunal (1966, Stockholm, Sweden; 1967, Roskilde, Denmark). Ultimately, however, Winter Phoenix is a document of resilience. Language decays. A ceremony eclipses its trial, and the radical possibilities of a single scream rises from annihilation.
A book of testimonies in verse, Winter Phoenix is a collection of poems written loosely after the form of an international war crimes tribunal. The poet, a daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, navigates the epigenetics of trauma passed down, and across, the archives of war, dislocation, and witness, as she repeatedly asks, “Why did you just stand there and say nothing?” Here, the space of accusation becomes both lyric and machine, an “investigation” which takes place in the margins of martial law, the source material being soldiers’ testimonies given during three internationally publicized events, in this order—The Incident on Hill 192 (1966, Phù Mỹ District, Vietnam); The Winter Soldier Investigation (1971, Detroit, USA); and The Russell Tribunal (1966, Stockholm, Sweden; 1967, Roskilde, Denmark). Ultimately, however, Winter Phoenix is a document of resilience. Language decays. A ceremony eclipses its trial, and the radical possibilities of a single scream rises from annihilation.
- GenresPoetry
140 pages, Paperback
First published November 9, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 4, 2022
At its best, this book is a continual act of withholding, which reflects how the justice for the crime at the base of this book has been withheld, and how difficult it is to register the entirety of the crime when the very fact of the crime has not been officially acknowledged. This paradox revolving around the fixed record for the crime, how it comes up short for the branching consequences of it, informs the Terazawa's poetics. And, for me, uses the wide lens of poetic expression to put pressure on the inherently limited record available in the archive. And, further, how this has real-world effects.
December 28, 2022
"His laws that nation swore by: first, dropped into
Jungles; then, pronouncing dead, our beastly forms
Made red then winged. I rose from that unharmed.
I rose, for I was timed as brown among his other
Treatise. May that poem make, for us, this amulet
Of justice. May that enter shape then lore, my love
Fighting to live, so one day we might meet you."
Jungles; then, pronouncing dead, our beastly forms
Made red then winged. I rose from that unharmed.
I rose, for I was timed as brown among his other
Treatise. May that poem make, for us, this amulet
Of justice. May that enter shape then lore, my love
Fighting to live, so one day we might meet you."
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews