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Finalist for the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize,
the Paris Review Prize in Poetry,
the Sawtooth Poetry Prize,
and the Open Book Award.
Featured on
Poetry Daily
Why is the Edge Always Windy?
Mong-Lan
Tupelo Press, 2005
ISBN: 1932195289
Mong-Lan, a writer,
visual artist and dancer, came to the United States as a child with
her family the day before the fall of Saigon in 1975. Her second
book of poems, Why Is The Edge Always Windy?, requires that
we extend ourselves and dive beneath the surface of reality. It is
a stunning book of revelations, nightmares, and love poems,
cross-cultural and historically compelling. Grounded in the rhythms
of the heart and the world, the poems are lyrically intense with an
edgy intelligence. The poet entices you to enter her world, asking
questions, drawing you into her visions of the past, present and
future.
In Why Is The Edge
Always Windy?, the poet travels to many cities,
whether Saigon, Hanoi, San Francisco, New York City, Paris,
Lausanne, Bangkok or Phnom Penh. Rhythms of the city and
countryside, rhythms of disaster, rhythms of the earth, rhythms of
desire are manifest in these poems. Imagistic, surreal and
penetrating, her writing cuts to the quick, “nothing less but the
world at stake.” Whether writing of Vietnam or 9/11, Mong-Lan’s
language is inventive and muscular, at times philosophical and
elegiac. In these lyrics a concern for the fate of humanity and the
world is posited. The book
ends with a play on words, the lover visiting the beloved, from
“Trail”, “patterned below the scandent mountains /
they've had a million
years to practice their lines.”
Purchase the book now at the link below direct from me, at
your bookseller,
or Tupelo Press.
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*
"Trail"
from Why Is the Edge Always
Windy? is included in the anthology, Best American Poetry of 2002.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .(paid link--as an Amazon Associate, earning from qualifying purchases)
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Praise for Why Is the
Edge Always Windy?
“what you’ve lived
through you are,” says Mong-Lan in “Coast,” one of the early poems in
this beautiful, spellbinding book, Why is the Edge Always Windy? One
should not be mislead by the title into thinking Mong-Lan’s work will be airy.
The lyricism of her writing sings not of the ethereal but of a hard land;
her work speaks not of arrested moments but of the tectonic force of
history, which, moving at the pace of geological time, presses cultures
against each other, folds moments over each other, edges everywhere and
always exposed. Indeed, Mong-Lan’s are poems of exposure. Reading them is
revelatory.
--LYN HEJINIAN
Mong-Lan's Why Is The Edge Always Windy? is a stunning book that
turns our "era of exile" into one of lyric possession, the impulses to
lament and to praise whirling together into a bittersweet music. I'm amazed
at how these poems hold the complexity and contradiction of a global world
view that spans from Hanoi to New York, from Chiapas to San Francisco, while
still striking notes of intimacy and making formally beautiful sense.
--ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING, author Genius Loci (Penguin Poets,
2005)
"Mông-Lan is a remarkably
accomplished poet. Always her poems are deft, extremely graceful in the way
words move, and in the cadence that carries them. One is moved by the
articulate character of ‘things seen,’ the subtle shifting of images, and
the quiet intensity of their information. Clearly she is a master of the
art."
--ROBERT
CREELEY
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Poems from
Why Is the Edge Always Windy?
"Coast"
"Three-Auricled
Heart"
From "Trail"
"Keel
of Earth's Axis,"
featured on
Poetry Daily
"Coyote," from
Jacket 19, in collaboration with Verse Magazine:
"Elegy"
From
Seneca Review, Spring, 1999.
Coast
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what are ten or a hundred years
the blink
the wait
numb a nail
diligent as wind
scars tucked in your
fists
you cross
the etched palm of the
Pacific
the ocean
a letter
written over shore
unread
shred by waves
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2
your last Tet
walls fall like seasons' masks
shadows lean back and forth
like paper
drums roll
police sirens shrill
Buddhists head for pagodas
the minute it strikes midnight
Sai Gon
pick-pockets
barefoot selling imitation cigarettes
dusty marketplaces
thick mamas
& svelte virgins at money boxes
immortal motorcycles
exaggerate the air
of shrimp batter
the lines on your face
don't detail
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3
her legs forced open
moving hands
ugly mouths
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4
on the shore a walrus
head bitten off
barnacles
on its fins a thirsty
Caliban
what you've lived through
you are
undercurrents ripe to capsize
everyone the boat
the dying
brother clothes burnt to flag help
prisons forged your will
where we were
a terrain created
from the coast i see our birthplace at the horizon's
sleeve a conscious pinpoint
you trekked the Pacific Viet Nam's
coasts
Los Angeles San Francisco
San Jose
Seattle
cities rolled together
chain-smoked
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5
you drag
your belongings along the coasts
your duffel bag pair
of jeans
another shirt
rootless memory
a snail
sculpts
sand down the length of water
waves come
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("Trail" was o
riginally
published in jubilat. Reprinted in Best American Poetry of 2002.
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Prelude
& part 1 of 10.)
Trail
prelude
this age our era i can correctly say this an era of exile
this satiny
desert
on this trail
of a thousand years there is us amidst misfits & assiduous trees
we have walked
over sand sick
with evening of words spilling
what is the remedy for momentum for mania a deciduous heart?
loitering now
i speak of nothing no ideas just viet nam motherland inside us
& between us the air the arizona sun magnanimous accepting everything
an ear of
deaths in a polaroid photo & the killing
this age of
hyper awareness this time of blue moons
of the year nineteen hundred ninety nine on the seventh day
the ocean the
past we touch
inside our skin a sterling sound
we who have
walked alone will no longer
through woods
red with evening of dreams spilling
growing old a
california sequoia green &
sage as the saguaro branching
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1
a crab crawls
sideways into a polaroid photo tangled you loiter & now you speak of nothing
no ideas pushed into hole the fabric mice-chewed
you have been
going back & forth from the border of . . . what was it?
when upon seeing a person with alzheimer's on tv when
a flippant offer of someone buying you something when after a family dinner
in which the main conversation was having desires versus shutting them off
you wander into the streets eyes wet while you notice how roseate the sky is
how demure the heat is not its usual how you should be enjoying such a night
but nevertheless you go wherever your blind feet take you places
well-acquainted see cars pass & wonder if the headlights expose & wonder if
any will stop
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Elegy
by Mong-Lan
& what if hope crashes through the door what if
that lasts a somersault?
hope for serendipity
even if a series of meals were all between us
even if the aeons lined up out
of order
what are years if not measured by trees
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