Salt & Ashes

These poems explore the complexities of identity, heritage, mental health, alienation, and heartbreak. There's a quiet comfort in being seen by someone who's lived through similar emotions-someone who's felt deeply and still found a way to stand, offering their strength through words. The lines are powerful and raw, capturing desperation without losing sight of hope.

"Holding onto hope is a human condition because what else do we have besides hoping when everything else is falling apart."

It's a beautifully structured, beautifully written collection. - M.L.

This collection covers a wide range, relationships, war, politics, faith, survival, and everything in between. Some poems are direct. Others are layered in references, Babel, Ophelia, Sisyphus, Modiano, and I had to slow down and sit with them, or look something up. That didn't take away from the impact. If anything, it added to it.

There's a lot of anger in these pages. Not just loud anger, though that's here too, but quiet bitterness, exhaustion, even sarcasm. There are poems about a mother's love, but also what it costs. Poems that ask if survival is worth it, or if it just is.

One line stayed with me:

"I didn't choose to be this way.â¨After all, I only have one option: to live."

That's the heart of the book for me. Not healing, not redemption, just the fact that some people keep going because there's no other choice.

This isn't a soft collection. It's not trying to be inspirational. It names things most people don't say out loud. And that made it powerful. - M.J.

These oft-clipped poems possess a bewitching quality, as if they were whittled from a scarred memory. One poem contained a curious reference to a Vietnamese writer named Nam Cao whose work, it seems, has not yet been translated for English readers. I did stumble upon one translated short story by him; it made sense why his themes of alienation and dissociation and his direct yet indirect style might be so admired by Dinh that one poem is named after him ("Reading Nam Cao in the Dark" I think it is called). These are dark poems containing multiple references to Sisyphus, Hamlet, Bukowski, Joan of Arc, and Hemingway but they are also quite personal, providing snapshots of the eternal but often frayed familial bonds, and strangely life-affirming, holding up a broken mirror and seeing a way through it while acknowledging the debris, emotional baggage, and ghosts refusing to be left behind. - N.P