First published 2007
In 1978, in building #48 of the Nongkai refugee camp in Thailand, a Lao father fills a scrapbook with doodles, addresses, stamps, maps, and measurements. When he throws it away, his daughter retrieves it from the trash. From these salvaged fragments, she discovers something precious hidden in the discarded pages. The poems that emerge carry the weight of displacement and survival, their sparse language and careful spacing on the page transforming everyday marks into vessels of meaning. Each letter and line break becomes significant, each blank space holds as much power as the words themselves. The collection builds from these recovered scraps into something that reveals as much through what it withholds as what it shows, creating poetry from the detritus of refugee life.
Genres: poetry, biography-memoir, 21st-century, asian-american
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, lyrical
Tropes: found-family
Setting: Nongkai, Thailand
Period: 1978
64 pages · Paperback · Pedlar Pr