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Reviews
There are two kinds of readers in
English, those who are passionate fans of the poetry of Linh Dinh
and those who have yet to read his writing […]. Linh Dinh
looks at the world with the clearest eyes imaginable, a walking
example of the role of the real at the heart of the surreal.
— Ron Silliman
Reading Linh Dinh is a tonic and a revelation. His poems might
have taken off the top of Dickinson’s head, and then some.
Linh Dinh raids and reinvents the language with an ardor bordering
on delirium.
— Rachel Loden
Linh Dinh’s is a unique voice in contemporary American literature.
He writes with the raging wit and the soul of a poet.
—Jessica Hagedorn
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Review
Linh Dinh is one of the most consistently surprising writers around.
One can find sources & roots for his writing, explain the
traces of surrealism through the presence, say, of the French
in Vietnam (tho they were driven out a decade before he was born),
note that he is hardly the only good or successful Vietnamese
American poet, let alone the only poet to come from a working
class background, yet he is not writing “about” or even
“toward” nor “from” any one of these contexts
so much as he is through them – they are lenses, filters,
that condition his perspective on everyday life. Imagine what
any other poet with this strong a sense of form would have had
to become in order to write such poetry. Ted Berrigan, for example.
Berrigan shares Linh’s class background, which enables him
to be as ruthless in a different way as Linh is in his. But the
comparison stops there. Linh is writing straightforward poetry,
but from a perspective shared by almost no one else. This kind
of exile is far deeper than mere geography. Reading Borderless
Bodies, you can feel Linh’s deep loneliness on every page
& realize that there are aspects of his poetry that you can’t
find anywhere else. We probably haven’t had a writer this
singular since the death of William Burroughs.
Ron Silliman
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Linh Dinh
is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (2000)
and Blood and Soap (2004), and a book of poems, All Around What
Empties Out (2003). His work has been anthologized in Best American
Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, and Great American Prose
Poems from Poe to the Present (2003). and Three Vietnamese Poets
(2001). He is also the editor of Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction
from Vietnam (1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (2001).
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