Episode #119 Family Ties - Diana Khoi Nguyen

Content Warning: Suicidality

Connor and Jack think through Diana Khoi Nguyen's remarkable poem "Family Ties," part of her haunting debut collection Ghost Of. They discuss the complex emotional textures Nguyen evokes in the poem, the challenges of representations of suicide, and ideas of family, self, and metaphorical webs.

More on Nguyen here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/diana-khoi-nguyen

Family Ties

By: Diana Khoi Nguyen

Gradually a girl’s innocence itself becomes her major crime

A doe and her two fawns bent low in the sumac along the bank of a highway,

the pinched peach of their ears twitching in the heat

Into the disordered evening my brother cut out only his face from every

photograph in the hall, carefully slipping each frame back into position

What good does it do?

Decades of no faces other than our own chipping faces

What good does it do, this resemblance to nothing we know of the dollhouse

New parents watch their newborn resting in a sunny patch of an empty

room, the newborn making sense of its container—

And from the road a deer ripened in death and a tuft of fur—or dandelion—

tumbled along, gently circled, driftwood, shaking loose, gathered,

dissolving into the mouths of jewelweed nearby

Earth is rife with iron and blood is rich in stardust

Immediately I spotted one hoof print, then nothing, as if this was where she

dragged herself out of the body

Strips of tire torn from their orbit

Is it right then, that we are left to hurtle alone

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