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
- “There’s a way to set a line to remind a reader: poetry is incantation’s medium. Mai Der Vang’s Primordial, then, is a deep spell compendium composed of insistent repetition near graven in its gravity. Vang makes smoke out of LIGHT, planets with LANGUAGE, existence against erasure, and names from secrets, which is to say: this is remarkable poetry set to transfix.”—Douglas Kearney
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.
List Price
$18.00
Purchase at
Purchase at:
About the Author
Upcoming Events
Mai Der Vang reading and in conversation with Chaun Webster about PRIMORDIAL at East Side Freedom Library
Date:
Location:
East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul, MNview map
LOCATION: East Side Freedom Library. Copies of Primordial will be available for purchase from Subtext Books. Stay tuned for details!
Praise
- “Relational, vulnerable, and elegantly woven, Vang’s poems animate the endangered saola alongside the resilience of the Hmong people, juxtaposing the origins of life with the legacies we leave behind. . . . This book is a reminder that our survival is intertwined with the natural world at large, and a call to protect both.”—Hoa Nguyen
