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     behind the image, the imagination

                                                        --Mong-Lan

                                                     

 


Song of the Cicadas ] Why is the Edge Always Windy? ] Tango, Tangoing: Poetry & Art ] Publications ] Vietnamese Translations ] Japanese Translations ] [Prose]


       
  Mong-Lan's poems beautifully reflect the displacement of her life and that of countless others with similar refugee experiences.  Born in Vietnam, along with her family, she was evacuated as a child on the day before Saigon fell in 1975.  Having been educated in the United States, she returned to Vietnam for the first time in 1995.  She traveled from north to south, Hanoi to Ha Tien.  The journeys she depicts in poetry are long and winding, the words, terse and spare.  Her poems often deal with the struggle of constructing an identity for oneself through language, using language to sift through and sculpt the layers of being and consciousness.  She writes of the new Vietnam, after it opened its doors to the world in the '90s: Hanoi, the capital, and Saigon, or officially called Ho Chi Minh City.  Whether writing of the war or of love, she sings directly to heart.  Her later extended experiences in Mexico, France, Switzerland, Argentina, Thailand, and Japan form the fabric from which many of her poems draw lyrical and artistic inspiration.
 
 

Mong-Lan, self-portrait, Tokyo, 2006

 

 

this age our era i can correctly say this an era of exile   

this satiny desert

on this trail of a thousand years there is us amidst misfits & assiduous trees

  

. . . .

 

                                    what is the remedy for momentum for mania a deciduous heart?

loitering now i speak of nothing no ideas just vietnam motherland inside us

                        & between us the air   arizona sun magnanimous accepting everything

 

From "Trail,"Why is the Edge Always Windy?, Tupelo Press, 2005.

 
 

 

 

"Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art" by Mong-Lan

 

Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art
Pen & Ink Drawings of Tango dancers and poetry by Mong-Lan
Valiant Press, Spring 2008
Available in major bookstores in May, or at Amazon.com
ISBN: 978-0-6151-8800-3

Welcome to the tango, sensual, elusive and alluring. Mong-Lan’s award-winning poetry and elegant pen & ink drawings reflect and reveal her love of the Argentine tango.

"Improvisatory, epigrammatic, sensual, meditative, and always generous, Mong-Lan celebrates, as well as dissects, the intricacies and implications of the tango. Interweaving art with verse, this collection will leave you breathless from its impassioned elaborations and imagistic intensity."--Cyril Wong

 

     
 

"Love Poems to Tofu & Other Poems" by Mong-Lan



Love Poem to Tofu & Other Poems
Chapbook of poetry & calligraphic art by Mong-Lan
Valiant Press, September, 2007.
ISBN: 978-0-6151-4656-0

Purchase the book now at your bookseller or at Amazon.com

In this highly unusual chapbook, memorable poetry and beautiful calligraphic art are married to exquisite tastes. One immediately identifies with Mong-Lan’s poems, while with her calligraphic art, one wishes to linger. And, the tastes remain, even after the pages are closed. Whether Mong-Lan is singing of her love to food or writing of Southeast Asia (particularly Vietnam and Thailand), her poetry is quick-witted, humorous, vibrant , intoxicating and worldly. One sips the words slowly, imbibes to smell, not only to taste; then to devour wholeheartedly of what the soul sings.

     
     
 

Why is the Edge Always Windy?

Mong-Lan

Tupelo Press, 2005
ISBN:  1932195289

 

Sketches, calligraphy, cover painting, and photo in book by Mong-Lan

 

Purchase the book now at your bookseller,

Amazon.com, or Tupelo Press.

     

Book Jacket: "Song of the Cicadas" by Mong-Lan

Song of the Cicadas

  • Winner of the 2000 Juniper Prize

  • Winner of the 2002 Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Awards for Poetry.

  • Finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award

Published by the University of Massachusetts Press, May 2001. 
ISBN: 1558493077

Cover photo, cover design, & sketches

inside book by Mong-Lan.

Purchase the book at your bookseller, Amazon.com or UMASS Press.

 


 

Prose by Mong-Lan

 
   
   

 

 

 

Videos / Voice


Links to other poems on the web by Mong-Lan

 

"Love Poem to Banh Cuon," English and Vietnamese, www.damau.org, 2006.

 

"Love Poem to Spinach," (originally published in The Colorado Review), English and Vietnamese, www.damau.org, 2006.

 

From "Argentine Tango: Observations While Dancing (Part 4)," Coconut Five, 2006.

 

"A Bamboo Knife," PRIVATE International, Italy.

 

"Keel of Earth's Axis," from Why is the Edge Always Windy? featured on Poetry Daily

 

From Jacket 13, a co-production with New American Writing, "Three-Auricled Heart"

 

From Jacket 19 — October 2002, in collaboration with Verse Magazine:  "Coyote"

 

From Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, Vol 11.2, 1999
 

From Poemcafe--An international network of poets based in Seoul, Korea

 

From VietnamJournal.org:  Mong-Lan, The Interview Hour and Two Poems, September 2001

 

 


 


   

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Please respect the fact that all artwork and writing (except where indicated) and poetry on this website are copyrighted by Mong-Lan. It may not be stored, displayed, published, reproduced, without her written permission.