Reviews of She, Self-Winding

Lưu Diệu Vân’s poetry asserts the feminine self within time. The poet winds her own clock. She, Self-Winding, the title of her fourth collection, reflects the tensions between public and private, tradition and renewal, past and present, hardcore pragmatism and poignant romanticism. It also reflects on history, and histories, of war and immigration.

The narrative compression, mysterious wording, and dramatic irony in Lưu Diệu Vân’s poetry remind you of fractured fairytales, blues ballads, tragic novels with tongue-in-cheek endings, and all those moody, pregnant moments in the films of Wong Kar-wai.

Lưu Diệu Vân’s poems are about women submitting to, or ambiguously subverting, their narratives. The poems are both tragic and comic. Camp mixed with pathos. For example, “My Stepmother’s Shoes” is about a woman who crosses an entire ocean to join her lover who lives in a cold climate, bringing with her a suitcase full of summer shoes. She later finds out that this lover is only “a sweet talker/[who] didn’t even have a bank account.” But the Cinderella ending comes years later, with a twist. In her seventies, this stepmother finds herself “handcuffed” to happiness and won’t leave her bed! The word handcuffed is disturbingly cheeky —is she toying with the reader’s expectations of a happy feminist ending, or is she saying that enslavement becomes liberation when submitted willingly in an S&M context? We will never know, because we still exist in a world stranded between shame and fulfillment, silence and indecision. This world, while offering many advancements for women, still is full of taboos, still imposes rules and regulations on their bodies, in both the public and private realms.

The push-pull between tradition and progress, weakness and strength, is the liveliest, most incisive aspect of Lưu Diệu Vân’s poetry. In “Premier Funeral,” while a Vietnamese grandfather is enlightened enough to confer upon his beloved granddaughter the radical “privilege of the first-born, absent son,” he however succumbs to a seemingly inevitable and most cliché of endings. The grandfather’s death, by opium addiction, is the typical fate befallen many Confucian intellectuals. While a common Vietnamese woman’s destiny is to take care of her family, an educated Vietnamese man’s freedom is simply his ability to escape both private and public responsibilities.

There is no real assimilation for a cultural transplant, as her fractured experience has turned her into Frankenstein’s monster. The romance celebrated in Hollywood classic films, of well-scrubbed teenagers hot-rodding down antiseptic American streets while classic rock blaring on the radio, becomes a domestic horror tableau in Lưu Diệu Vân’s poem, something that could have been captured by the photographer Diane Arbus.  In “Scent-Free Speed,” an Asian father, “bitter of warfare and cesspit cleanup,” guns a Mustang Thunderbird through dilapidated neighborhoods while heaping verbal abuse on his family. His teenage daughter, “late in menstruating,” is desperate to be an adult. Lost in her private romance inspired by a cosmetic perfume ad, yet also trapped in the horrendous present, the girl feels drenched by the summer heat and rashy from dime store fishnet stockings.

Despite Lưu Diệu Vân’s frequent use of humor and irony, there is also a deep romanticism in her poetry, reminding you of the three tenets of love—faith, hope, and charity, celebrated in Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. Let’s all hear the very moving closure of her poem, “Of Dust and Us”:

My hand gives you uncontaminated confidence to hold yourself accountable
flashes to ashes

The country house with see-through ceiling reappears to the south

Where my vagrant body always points

And yours, fearlessly near.

To read Lưu Diệu Vân’s poetry, is to see “through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.”

Đinh Từ Bích Thúy


Đinh Từ Bích Thúy is the coeditor of the Vietnamese literary magazine Da Màu, editor-at-large for Asymptote Journal, freelance critic, and literary translator. She was a 2020 writer-in-resident at Woodlawn-Pope Leighey House in Alexandria, Virginia, and a 2018 scholar at the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference in Vermont. Her works have appeared in NPR, NBC, Da Màu, Asymptote, Prairie Schooner, Manoa, Michigan Quarterly Review, Rain Taxi Review of Books, among others. She is based in the Washington DC Metropolitan Area, USA.

She, Self-Winding

She, Self-Winding is a collection of poems that explores, through slanted narrative and shrewd linguistic play, the trajectory of an immigrant girl from a remote village who endures the aftermath of a civil war as she makes her escape by boat, leaves behind a home country, copes with domestic violence and abuse as a teenager, and grows up in a democratic Western society as a woman forming her own social and sexual paradigms, all in times of incredulity.

Publication date: September 2022

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse

Pre-Order: https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/she-self-winding/

Praise for Previous Work

Luu Dieu Van’s poems are interesting because of her skillful and exquisite usage of imagery. In fact, it’s a tour de force. In almost every single poem, one could find an intriguing effect created by the peculiar choice of words that she inserts at the right place and the right time.

Trinh Y Thu, author of The Ruins of Mirages

Luu Dieu Van’s poetry has a strong emphasis on diction, it employs a language which addresses the public. Her poetry is not for the page alone, it is also for the tongue, for the performance stage. It is a spoken voice, the audience will hear the wit of the words, the exuberance of the vernacular and the energy of the speech.

Nguyen Tien Hoang, author of Captive and Temporal

Rich in theme, with a brave and lively selection of imagery, Van excels at incisive observation—at times tragic, and more often than not, very funny.

Jennifer Mackenzie, author of Navigable Ink

Thế Kỷ Của Những Vật Tế


thơ Lưu Diệu Vân

tranh Quan Steele
Văn Học Press xuất bản, 04/2021
thiết kế bìa: Trần Thu Ngân
88 trang, ấn phí: US$15.00

>>> Tìm mua trên BARNES & NOBLE <<<
The ky cua nhung vat te by Luu Dieu Van, Paperback | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com)

Qua chữ và qua tranh, Thế Kỷ Của Những Vật Tế vẽ ra một thế giới đang sưng phồng từ những phân tranh và tan rã bởi những hoài nghi, nơi con người tìm mọi cách để trốn chạy sự nhìn nhận, để rồi lúc đứng bên bờ vực hệ lụy, khi lối thoát duy nhất là nắm lấy tay nhau, họ sẽ làm gì?

Cô gái và tình nhân bên bờ địa ngục đỏ, những người chị, các bà mẹ, những người nữ đang sập bẫy, trên ban công, trên ghế nhung, trong chuồng máu, xuyên mẩu bánh mì, xuyên chiếc áo sơ mi đẫm mùi nội tiết tố, xuyên mũi tên Trọng Thủy, họ sẽ làm gì?

Ngôn ngữ nhị phân của con mắt trí huệ có dẫn họ về nơi tử tế?

Tất cả ẩn náu trong Thế Kỷ Của Những Vật Tế.

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Có lẽ nhiều người sẽ có chung một cảm nhận rằng sức hấp dẫn của thơ Lưu Diệu Vân nằm ở cách sử dụng hình tượng tài hoa, tinh tế. Thực chất, có thể nói nó đã lên đến mức điêu luyện (tour-de-force). Gần như ở bài thơ nào chúng ta cũng có thể thấy một sức hấp dẫn tạo nên bởi cách lựa chọn ngôn từ độc đáo, được xuất hiện đúng lúc, đúng chỗ.

– Trịnh Y Thư, nhà thơ

Một ngôn ngữ vừa bùng nổ dữ dội vừa mê đắm, đan xen giữa sự thấu đáo của những cảm giác tương hợp với cái chính xác hài hước và sắc sảo để lật tẩy sự vật. Một “người đàn bà” tinh tường và luôn áp đảo để được nhu thuận, đau đớn, kiêu hãnh… theo cách của mình.

– Khánh Phương, nhà thơ

Vượt qua được các ràng buộc, đối kháng của lớp cha anh: chiến tranh-hòa bình, bắc-nam, nhược tiểu-đại cường… Lưu Diệu Vân mời người đọc, qua thơ, tìm đến với những suy nghĩ và quan niệm của cô, rất nữ tính nhưng luôn chủ động trong mọi tình huống.

– Cổ Ngư, nhà văn

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Thế Kỷ Của Những Vật Tế là tập thơ thứ hai bằng tiếng Việt của nhà thơ Lưu Diệu Vân, và cũng là tác phẩm thứ tư của cô được xuất bản. Tập thơ gồm nhiều bài thơ mới chưa xuất hiện nơi đâu, kèm theo nhiều tranh minh họa của Quan Steele, một họa sĩ từng được trao tặng nhiều giải thưởng.

“M of December” Press Release

What does M stand for? Why December? These are among the many questions that will occupy your curiosity upon reading my new poetry collection, and though poetry is wide open for the readers’ most personal interpretation, I believe the answers will unravel for you, perhaps right away, mid-way, or endways, like a ball of yarn that Mrs. Creator is knitting in the Universe that Mr. Creator has blasted into engenderment. I am forever their inquisitive pet cat, determined to get to the core of it all… For the moment, I stand a mitted Ragdoll with colored mask and white chin.

Walsh media release.indd

The Doppelgänger of Translation

I have always enjoyed the art of translation, especially when the language I am trying to decipher is perplexing intellectual poetry. Searching for that Doppelgänger of the two languages – Vietnamese & English – is like hunting for that childhood friend you’d lost during the exodus of growing up — you no longer remember the details of her face, but you can positively feel she is the right one when the intimacy is within detection range. When that perfect word, which can carry both languages on its back and in its heart, waves its hand at you out of nowhere, there is no better rapport. And then there are two of it, inseparable mirror images with dual atypical personalities born out of the same etymological womb. Joyful cry follows every birth, as it seems.

What is your most joyful moment of the translation gestation? Share with me, or my eager Doppelgänger.