PLACING THE ACCENTS
Genre: Poetry
Publication Date: 1999
Press: Apogee Press
ISBN: 9780966993714
A book of poetry examining language, family, and history.
Read reviews below for further descriptions.
PTA was a finalist for a Western States Book Award for Poetry.
Gillian Conoley, author of: A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems
“In placing the accents, 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…” --
Additional
Praise
Sam Hamill
“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 --”
Kathleen Fraser
“Narration, physically close as a noose. Clarified American speech slashed by Vietnamese shadow vernacular. Water supply, sparse and diminishing. Teeth marks: word hunger: eating, bitter and fabulous. Truong Tran's first book is a voluptuary of the difficult real. To be entered, and entered. Gratefully.”
Edward Smallfield, Poetry International
“Truong's work embodies our struggles with language, identity, and culture. The title of placing the accents refers to Truong's mother's help in the placing of accents in Vietnamese, and identifies him as a man from two diverse cultures. As the book proceeds, free-verse poems become unpunctuated prose blocks, representing a surrender by Truong, an offering up of the gift of the interpretation of language to the reader, perhaps in an attempt to meet the reader as an individual rather than as a representative of any culture – as if that were possible…
Truong's work is full of generosity, honesty, passion, experimentation, excitement – everything that keeps poetry alive.”