Keynote
Pulitzer Prize finalist Mai Der Vang’s “lyrical interventions strike powerful notes of lamentation and rage” (The New Yorker)
Book Title
Primordial
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “In these highly original poems, and throughout Primordial, Vang unpacks the sentences that history writes—their unrelenting march, their obsessive truncation—to reveal a stunning, revelatory language of fragility, extinction, and ancestral origin.”—Christopher Kondrich, The Washington Post
Poem Excerpt
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.
—from “Animal”
Body
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.
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.
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About the Author
Praise
- “Vang’s expansive third collection . . . pays tribute to the vanishingly rare saola, an antelope-like forest mammal from the ‘feral heaven’ of Laos and Vietnam that is also, in Vang’s hands, a metaphor for the fate of the Hmong people.”—The New York Times Book Review
- “The insistent and formally experimental third collection from Vang turns her incisive poetic eye to the critically endangered saola—a bovine native to Laos and Vietnam—to explore themes of colonialism, war, and extinction. . . . An ambitious and impassioned contribution to contemporary poetry.”—Publishers Weekly
- “The saola morphs in purpose and presence across these poems, as Mai Der Vang continues to forge an ecopoetics that embodies intricate intersections of war, colonialism, environment, and refuge. . . . These are poems of survival.”—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub
- “Vang draws poignant associations between the precarity faced by a creature on the verge of extinction and the plight of Hmong refugees seeking safety and identity. The result is an intimate collection that meditates on climate and survival both in the outdoor world and within the family.”—Alta Journal
