Kimberly Nguyen, Matthew Ho

Kimberly Nguyen is a Vietnamese-

American poet and the author of I Am Made of War,
flesh, and ghosts in the stalks. She is originally from
Omaha, Nebraska but currently lives in Brooklyn,
New York. She is a recent graduate of Vassar
College, where she holds degrees in English and
Russian Studies. She also studied abroad at the
University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

When asked why she writes, Nguyen always

tells people the story of her first birthday. Her
parents laid out twelve objects in front of her as part
of the traditional ceremony. Her one-year-old
consciousness couldn’t have known a pen from a
comb or a stethoscope, but she nonetheless sealed
her fate when she finally chose the pen. Her parents had kept this story from her, however, until
she was much older, so she didn’t always know that she was going to be a writer.

Growing up, Nguyen remembers, writing was not cool, it didn’t help her make friends,
and her parents were never a fan of the idea. In fact, her father used to turn out the light as she
wrote to discourage her from doing it. Still, she would move her pen and notebook to the light of
the streetlamp that crept in through her bedroom window, writing in secret. Even when it was
hard to, she never lost the urge to write. When she was hurting, she wrote about it. When she
didn’t have friends, she wrote them into existence.

Nguyen was heavily influenced by her mother, who equated being Vietnamese to being
fiercely loyal to South Vietnam. Nguyen was told a very anti-communist narrative from a young
age, about how the North Vietnamese had swooped in and stolen democracy from the South and
then rebranded it into a widespread propaganda campaign. Her mother supported America’s
involvement in the war, viewing it as a righteous campaign against a tyrannical regime. Though
that version is part truth, part of coming to terms with all the facets of Nguyen’s identity has
been understanding that there are no winners here.

Nguyen’s poetry seeks to explore each complicated avenue of her identity, to

acknowledge all the problems and joys of being Vietnamese-American. She mourns the loss of a
homeland and empathizes with her mother’s loss of country, and at the same time she reminds
herself of the South Vietnamese persecution of Buddhists. She is a proud American, and she
criticizes the American atrocities against the Vietnamese during the war. She understands that
there will be no easy answers the more she digs towards the root of who she is, but she doesn’t
think there is supposed to be. For her, to be alive is to always be in a state of change, and her
poetry is intended to reflect that change.

Nguyen confesses that, most of the time, when she brings her poetry to workshop, it gets
torn apart and most of those brutal comments come from a lack of understanding of her
experience and sometimes a refusal to. Her creative writing workshops have been mostly white,
and she’s often been the only person of color in the room. She’s come out of brutal workshops
ready to quit and burn all her writing, but deep inside her, there’s a need to persist. Existing as a
Vietnamese-American diaspora poet is inherently a political act. Her existence inherently goes
against the grain. Quitting would be a betrayal of her identity.

She combats ignorance of her experience by writing unapologetically bilingual poetry,

without translations. In effect, she essentially writes ghost stories. The only audience that will
have the most immediate access to her poetry is one that also floats between two languages the
way she does. In this way, she creates levels of access in her work and these different levels
protect her from the two worlds she’s caught between.

Nguyen is a recipient of the Beatrice Daw Brown Prize for excellence in poetry and a
Best of the Net nomination, and her work has been featured in diaCRITICS, Project Yellow
Dress, Sin Fronteras Journal, Meniscus Literary Journal, Parentheses Journal, and
perhappened mag. In addition to poetry, Kimberly was a journalist at The Miscellany News. Her
articles have garnered attention in the community as a form of activism and have been a catalyst
for institutional change. She aspires to be a full-time poet and eventually wants to hold an
advanced degree in poetry.

love languages

mẹ ơi
dear mom
con xin lỗi mẹ
how many apologies can the ocean hold? how many insults has our anger told?
mẹ ơi mẹ khỏe không? muốn bệnh hả mẹ? mẹ nghỉ đi nhé
if tenderness is a love language, it must’ve been a song i heard once and never again
hôm nay mẹ sao rồi? mẹ khỏe không? mẹ hết bệnh chưa?
we don’t swallow our coarseness because it hurts on the way down
mẹ ơi mẹ ơi mẹ đừng bỏ con mẹ đừng đi xa
but if we could just hold our fire for just one moment
mẹ ơi mẹ ăn chưa? hôm nay mẹ ăn gì?
we could let the silence seep in and speak tenderness for us
con thương mẹ rất nhiều