Afterland

Starred review from January 1, 2017

Poets such as Quan Barry and Ocean Voung have brought us face to face with the Vietnam War, and now Vang, an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers' Circle, reminds us that the war in Laos--the largest CIA paramilitary operation ever--was equally horrific. From the first page, the writing is visceral and potent; in 1975, when "your Hmong village is a graveyard," a son's head lies "in the rice/ pounder, shell-crumbled," and a brother's tongue is cut out, boiled, and "forced down your throat," an American returning home says casually, "Sorry about your mountains." The reader staggers as the next poem says, "I am a skin of sagging curtain.../ I am locked in the ash oven of a forest." Vang then moves on the refugee experience, as her parents leave Laos, "a herd of horses never/ To reclaim their steppes," and live amid "Rusted sedan, wire zipline/ to stapled roof//," bringing the bitter proclamation, "My parents fled for this." Throughout, Vang keeps the energy ratcheted up to the tightest turn of the wrench. VERDICT An especially accomplished debut--it won the 2016 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, a first-book publication prize--this is important reading.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2017
Recruited by the CIA to covertly combat Communist forces in the Secret War (195375), the Hmong people of Laos have since spent decades withstanding widespread political persecution. In her award-winning debut, Hmong American Vang deftly probes the tumultuous history of the Hmong, from the melodic myths of the ancients and the long-hushed horrors of war to the excruciating expense of exile ( Fire is the child / Whose parents are the dead ). Vang's collection interweaves profoundly personal recollections with unflinching glimpses into the circumstances of refugees past. While Your Mountain Lies Down with You invokes the sacrifices of the poet's grieving grandfather, Water Grave illuminates all he left behind: The crowded dead / turn into the earth's / unfolded bed sheet. / We drift near banks, / creatures of the Mekong, / heads bobbing like / ghosts without bodies. Yet, amid bullets and bees, cyanide and stars, humpbacks and harvests, Vang imbues her imagery not only with loss but also with the remarkable resilience and crystalline spirituality of Hmong lore and language. Ask me to build our temples / So rooted, so stone, we won't ever die out, Vang writes. With this luminous, indelible volume, she's already built one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

February 20, 2017
In this sinewy and unflinching debut, winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award, Vang shares the story of the Hmong diaspora who were forced out of Laos and into exile as a result of America’s secret war of the 1960s and ’70s: “This is a phantom attack/ that never happened, but our fallen know it did.” Vang refers to the U.S. recruitment of Hmong fighters to fight the People’s Army of Vietnam alongside Americans. As a result of Laos’s key location in the Vietnam War, areas of the country were subjected to years of bombing. “What ends the deepening numbers,” she writes, “resounding into night, a planeload/ releases every eight minutes forever.” Vang explores the depths of her inherited trauma (“I dig for my finest blouse, placenta/ of my home. It sleeps beneath// the bedpost,/ calling as the heartbeat underground”) and she shares the experience of the Hmong diaspora by chronicling the physical displacement of her people and a deep and reverberating spiritual disruption. Vang suffuses her poems with unnerving details of strife, which her attention to emotion and texture keep from feeling lifeless or exploitative. “Hmong people say one’s spirit can run off,/ go into hiding underground,” Vang writes, and she calls “for what left/ to come back,// and for the found/ to never leave.”