Extinction Theory

The poems in this collection establish Lam as one of the Asian-American literary voices to stay tuned for. Like Su Cho's The Symmetry of Fish and Stephanie Niu's She Has Dreamt Again of Water, Extinction Theory carefully dissects assimilation, family interactions, and origins. Its language and forms are immediate and insistent, as are the series of historical and personal events it conscientiously outlines.--Nicole Yurcaba "Colorado Review"
Kien Lam's beautiful, perplexed, shit-talking, heartbroken, chatty, weird, veering, wonderful (i.e., full of wonder), insolently syntaxed poems in Extinction Theory are like missives--sometimes speculative or fantastical; sometimes close as cigarette smoke--tethering loss and love, mourning and rebirth, regret and dream, rage and unadorned sorrow. This book is a true feat of the loving, yearning, capacious imagination. This is a book you will not soon forget.--Ross Gay "author of The Book of Delights"
Every once in a while, a poet changes the game up and writes a book that goes past narrative or lyric and into a realm of immaculate extravagance and wonder. Kien Lam's stunning debut, Extinction Theory, is one of those books. His is a singular voice, one that is telling us we better stand up and pay attention.--Adrian Matejka "author of Somebody Else Sold the World"
Kien Lam's Extinction Theory is a beautiful, probing collection that develops its own creation stories that end in the grieving of one kind of life in favor of another. It asks existential questions about what it means to be the child of Vietnamese immigrants, wondering about love and belonging, place, and passage. It asks questions of God. Deft with word play and pathos and a biting wit, Lam's writing is capacious and masterful. This is an extraordinary collection of poems: deeply intelligent and full of inquiry.--Cathy Linh Che "author of Split"