placing the accents

the long version

Poetry. In <em>placing the accents</em>, Truong Tran makes a poetry at once gestural and minimal, sparse and rich, of my father's broken english and my vietnamese tongue/discarded resewn. As much as this book is concerned with the powers and failures of language, with the complications of negotiating a cultural netherworld born somewhere between rural Vietnam and urban America, it is also the ancient story of lost innocence and childhood, of a boy and his father, each struggling to find a true home, a true family, a true nation —Gillian Conoley. Truong Tran's wonderful book — his poems are very much of-a-piece — is brilliant, disarmingly honest, and deeply insightful. He has performed the marvelous: he has given us a world —Sam Hamill.