The titular poem that kicks down the door of Blue Nguyen’s phenomenal poetry debut, Hey Siri, What Time is it in Vietnam? is, somewhat misleadingly, an erasure. Actually, erasure is a prominent formal choice in Nguyen’s book, expertly self-edited and ambitiously executed craft-wise, though I feel funny using the term erasure to review a book that feels so utterly additive in its nature. This may be Nguyen’s first full-length work, but it’s certainly not their first rodeo (keep an eye out for the speaker as a cowboy as you read)... Time, distance, and language meld together to form a generative spark, a launchpad for braving grief and self-exploration, an extinguisher of shame and the cold feeling of being left out in the rain. Of course, translation is a major motif in this poetic hybrid of English and Vietnamese text, with each progressive erasure poem asserting itself as the direct communicator we lust after in every language. 

translate/ I wish/ we had more/ time/ into/ Vietnamese. 

Appropriately, the formal leaps and bounds covered in Hey Siri include a makeshift Wikipedia page, again with redactions, which I found delightful as the book itself could easily be structured as the author’s future Wiki page, created for them by a devoted reader or biographer. It might go something like this:

• Born

• Early Life

• Blue

The Early Life section of the book is imbued with the matrilineal grief that I am familiar with as a child of immigrants and as a queer writer. Nguyen’s basis for their linguistic study begins with the playful translation of Cam, which signifies both gender neutral pronouns and the word for Oranges. In a less literal sense of translation, grief becomes synonymous with rain. Many of the acts of translation, I would argue, can be seen as both a reclamation and bastardization of a fraught and often neocolonialist form. Nguyen reinvents translation as an ongoing practice, valuing standardization less than highlighting the ineptitude of language (English especially) at categorizing emotional expression. Repetition is a fabulous instrument in Nguyen’s hand, though the formal variety of the book does not allow for any stagnant language. The linguistic interplay between Vietnamese and English fondly reminded me of Jessie McCarty’s recent debut, Pretty Punks, which did the same for me with Irish. 

Is there still room for me in this dream?

Nguyen is at their best when they confront writing about grief, even preemptively, head-on. The most touching parts of this book feel like a scientific processing of loss, and coupled with the aforementioned triumphs in repetition as a literary device, the author allows the degradation of text in this book to mirror the death of their father. With both the book and the man, we whittle away toward the mysterious bones. For me, the pinnacle of this book lies in Nguyen’s ability to process the precarities of life, namely the death of a patriarch, through dexterous metaphors such as orchid upkeep. The living family members in this book interestingly become funerary urns themselves – they don’t contain ashes, but memories, and allow the dead their dignities via solemn, poetic preservation. 

You leave me so much to carry/ I think of myself as a container

Occasionally, Nguyen indicates breath marks for the reader, so we might put down our own sorryness and take a moment to recalibrate. Other times, the text, even in its redactions, is as all-consuming as the grievous rain that keeps pouring down. More than a grief memoir or a debut poetry collection, this book deserves to be meditated upon. Nguyen has clearly proven themselves as a rigorous creator, and more importantly, as someone who can write a mirror. Look into this book and see what it brings you. It is a celebration of life.

HEY SIRI, WHAT TIME IS IT IN VIETNAM? by Blue Nguyen, Game Over Books, $18 USD