"A Plucked Zither beautifully reckons with the ghosts of war and the emotional turmoil of being othered in a new land, while shedding greater light on the Vietnamese diaspora. In poems that thread the richness of her native tongue together with familial history and ancestral voices, Vuong ventures into the grief to reclaim the losses. Both exquisite in language and enduring in spirit, this collection pulses forward to demand a new remembrance."
--Mai Der Vang, poet and author of Yellow Rain

"Engaged in the relational and polyvocality, the poems here speak across time and space, address generations, and disrupt linearity. Animated by ghosts, memory, and speaking across silences, multiply: 'the sound of hovering / singing ready/ to swing into a world / picture it carving.'"
--Hoa Nguyen, poet and author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

"In this work of poetry, Vuong unbinds what gets lost while carrying the aftermath from Vietnamese voices that have been longing to breathe after the disruption from wars, migration, and silence. In other words, through the trajectory of these poems, Vuong's speaker processes and dwells on the migrant's emotional experience. These poems cross paths with images on how migration distances mothers from their children and how that separation creates not only a familial distance, but an origin distance from a migrant's birth land." - Emily Velasquez, Soapberry Review

"A Plucked Zither is a bold collection where Vuong presents an "anti-map" of herself and of the children of Vietnamese migrants. Vuong's poems demonstrate how the shared experiences of the 1.5 and second generations of Vietnamese Americans continue to "make and remake" them--they are not so easily defined, whether by white America, their relatives, or in their personal turmoil to define their own relationship to Vietnam." --Cathy Duong, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network

"In this work of poetry, Vuong unbinds what gets lost while carrying the aftermath from Vietnamese voices that have been longing to breathe after the disruption from wars, migration, and silence. In other words, through the trajectory of these poems, Vuong's speaker processes and dwells on the migrant's emotional experience. These poems cross paths with images on how migration distances mothers from their children and how that separation creates not only a familial distance, but an origin distance from a migrant's birth land." -- Emily Velasquez, Soapberry Review

"A Plucked Zither is a bold collection where Vuong presents an "anti-map" of herself and of the children of Vietnamese migrants. Vuong's poems demonstrate how the shared experiences of the 1.5 and second generations of Vietnamese Americans continue to "make and remake" them--they are not so easily defined, whether by white America, their relatives, or in their personal turmoil to define their own relationship to Vietnam." --Cathy Duong, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network

"Poems like these are as two-sided as Vuong's title instrument: zither plucked and plucked, played upon and snatched away. For every touch of warmth and musicality, she admits something of the unknown or apparitional." - Christopher Spaide, Poetry Foundation
"Poems like these are as two-sided as Vuong's title instrument: zither plucked and plucked, played upon and snatched away. For every touch of warmth and musicality, she admits something of the unknown or apparitional." -- Christopher Spaide, Poetry Foundation