6/11/25
Wed,
17:30

Poetry Talk with Diana Khoi Nguyen
There is a hole inside the search box

Reading
Talk
Poesiefestival Berlin 2025
silent green
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(c) Karen Lue

Poet and multi-media artist Diana Khoi Nguyen (born in Los Angeles) writes very little, but in intense bursts; it is almost an eruptive act that unfolds over just a few weeks. One of the themes of her poems is the transgenerational transmission of trauma, particularly in relation to the lingering effects of the Vietnam War.

Her parents fled as teenagers with their parents after the fall of Saigon (the song “White Christmas,” which was the coded signal for evacuation, is mentioned in passing in one passage) and later met in the USA. Diana Khoi Nguyens’ brother Oliver, a constant and sometimes disturbing presence in her poems, took his own life in 2014. It is an event she repeatedly turns to, vainly searching for its causes: “Each of us describes my brother’s death in different terms, though the fact of his abscence interrupts us indiscriminately,” she writes at one point.

Diana Khoi Nguyen has published two highly acclaimed poetry collections. Her debut, Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018), lauded by the poet Terrance Hayes as brilliant, is a book steeped in the poetics of exile and elegy. Writing about Root Fractures (Scribner 2024), Layli Long Soldier has suggested: “Through the Vietnamese American experience, Diana Khoi Nguyen languages a feeling many of us can relate to, so often buried, silent and deep, within land, blood, bone, into molecular DNA.” Stories of origin and alienation are told through visual poems, altered photographs from family albums, and intertextual references to works by Lyn Hejinian and Robert Haas, amongst others.

All the poems presented at the event have been especially translated for Poesiefestival Berlin.

Diana Khoi Nguyen in conversation with her translator Birgit Kreipe

The event will be interpreted into English and German. Kindly supported by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen.
The event takes place at silent green's Atelierraum.