First published 2025
Cathy Linh Che examines her Vietnamese refugee parents' dual experience of escaping war and later appearing as film extras in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. This second poetry collection follows her debut Split and centers on how her parents found themselves relegated to background roles in a movie about their own trauma. Che employs persona poems, imaginative reconstruction, and golden shovel verse forms to relocate Vietnamese perspectives from film margins to poetic center stage. The work grapples with family rupture and the poet's own disownment, questioning whether parents can ethically serve as literary material. Che investigates the tension between private family narratives and public storytelling, while wrestling with concepts of reconciliation. The collection documents both historical displacement and contemporary estrangement, asking what costs come with transforming personal history into art and whether forgiveness remains possible across such divides.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, poetry, biography-memoir, asian-american
Vibes: emotionally-complex, intimate, lyrical, meditative, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-rupture, imaginative-reconstruction, persona-poems, private-versus-public-narrative
Setting: Vietnam
Period: Vietnam War era, 21st century
128 pages · Paperback · Washington Square Press
Content warnings: emotional-abuse, war