PhD Studentâs Debut Collection Shortlisted for a National Book Award
In âGhost Of,â poet Diana Nguyen meditates on loss and her familyâs past
With âGhost Ofâ (Omnidawn, 2018), her debut collection of poems, has bedazzled the critics and found herself blinking in the literary limelight.
In September, just months after its April publication date, Nguyen learned that âGhost Ofâ had been longlisted for a National Book Award. A few weeks later, the book had advanced to the five-book shortlist, giving it a healthy chance at capturing one of the highest honors any book, much less a first book, can receive.
âItâs crazy,â says Nguyen, a fourth-year PhD student in żì»îappâs creative writing program, a multimedia artist and a teaching assistant professor at the Daniels College of Business. âI still donât really understand. There are moments when Iâll be walking the dog, and I just go, âwhat?â Iâm just totally baffled. Iâm so totally grateful. But how did this happen?â
However it happened, it becomes red-carpet real next week, when Nguyen heads to New York for the Nov. 14 National Book Awards presentation. There, sheâll mingle with some of the nationâs hottest talents in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young peopleâs literature. In what she considers the unlikely event of a win, she has remarks prepared. Just in case.
Whether she wins or simply sits next to the winner, the whole experience is both exhilarating and bittersweet. âGhost Ofâ is, after all, a meditation on a tragedy â her brother Oliverâs suicide and the toll it exacted on her family. She began the work as a way of coming to terms with the loss. âI didnât want it to be a retraumatizing experience for me, but a bridge, a way to begin to honor and think about him and to think about our past,â she says.
Nguyen began her studies at żì»îapp some months following Oliverâs death in December 2014. Until a class taught by associate professor Selah Saterstrom of the creative writing faculty, she had postponed wrestling with Oliverâs story.
âOne assignment was to write a radical eulogy,â she says. âI had been really avoiding my brotherâs stuff. [But then, as part of the course assignment,] I built a cardboard coffin and laid in it every day for like 10 minutes. It was very meditative. I wanted to retrace his steps in death.â
Later, in August and December of 2016, the bulk of âGhost Ofâ materialized on paper.
âEvery writer has their own process,â Nguyen says. âI only write twice a year. I only write for 15 days in the summer and 15 days in December â because winter break is in December. Itâs really crazy. But I donât write outside of those times. When Iâm teaching, or when Iâm a student, Iâm 100 percent a student, and Iâm 100 percent a teacher. I canât split my brain. I canât do it.â
Between those 30 sunrises and sunsets, Nguyen aimed to write a publishable poem a day. She experimented with form and hovered over photos that signaled a looming crisis. Two years before Oliverâs suicide, she says, he got up in the middle of the night and gathered every family picture hanging in the house. Then, with an X-Acto knife, he sliced himself out of each image.
âIt was like a careful rage,â Nguyen recalls. âHe didnât smash anything. But he put them all back. We never talked about those pictures. My parents never took them down. They hung all the way up to his death. They hung even after his death.â
Nguyen contends with the emotional weight of those photos by incorporating them into a series of âTriptychâ poems scattered throughout the collection. In each, a defaced photo serves as the lead element, showing the family flanking a conspicuously empty space. The other two elements embed text within and around a silhouette of the departed Oliver, thus filling him in and pointing to his absence.
Beyond examining her brotherâs experiences, âGhost Ofâ also reflects on Nguyenâs familyâs history. Her parents came to America as refugees, having left Saigon in the chaos of the warâs denouement. Along the way, Nguyen says, they lost their homeland and any assumptions they may have had about their future. Their trauma had ramifications for their children, and in many ways, Nguyen says, âGhost Ofâ delves into the âfaultlines within the family dynamics.â
Saterstrom, who directs the creative writing PhD program, lauds Nguyen for her remarkable explorations of the human experience. âDianaâs work is able to locate the invisible pulse that animates the mystery of loss and recovery,â she explains. Thatâs a sentiment echoed by others. Poet Cole Swenson, who taught at żì»îapp for sixÌę years before moving to Brown University, hails âNguyenâs stunning first collectionâ for exploring âthe layered losses of displacement, migration, and death in ways that take full responsibility for the particularity of each individualâs experience.â
In the months since âGhost Ofâ was published, Nguyen has returned to individual poems at readings and events, but she has been slow to plunge into the book as a whole. On the one occasion when she read it from cover to cover, she was struck by her response.
âYou know what I felt that I hadnât experienced before was a lot of sympathy for me. Not me as a writer, but me as a woman, me as a sister, a daughter,â she says. âThat wasnât something I think I had before I wrote the bookâand before I read the book.â