‘Root Fractures’ finds the intersection between visual art and poetry as it paints a portrait of family

What information hides in a photograph? What secrets hide in a family? What gets lost — or buried — in a journey from one home to another? Diana Khoi Nguyen’s second poetry collection, “Root Fractures,” considers these questions and more through photography, text, collages and history in a brilliant portrait of family, immigration and war.  

Ngyuen, a poet and multimedia artist, was born in California to Vietnamese parents. The speaker of the poems is also a daughter of two Vietnamese parents. The parents’ history unfolds in a series of poems titled “Đổi Mới,” which was the name given to a series of economic reforms initiated in Vietnam in 1986. More generally, it means “renewal” or “renovation.” These poems explore the myth of these reforms, their impact on Vietnam’s economy, and their impact on the speaker’s family. 

Through these poems, the speaker tells the story of how her parents left Vietnam and later met in the United States, offering details and images that might be familiar to the reader, like the Eddie Adams photo capturing the execution of a Viet Cong officer. She also traces the broader history of conflict in East Asia, pointing to the ways in which family and country were set up for collapse long before the majority of the Western world took notice. She writes: “Before this war, there was another war, and before that war, another war, yet another one, and another, et al.” 

The tone of many of the poems is cold and analytical. The poem “Write a paragraph about your family” lists unfeeling, declarative statements as if the assignment were a science report: 

“At the moment, my family is American.

We are four people, not five.

My father and mother were Vietnamese in 1975.

They are engineers,

They engineered a new life here

In California, where they met.”

The distance established in this poem and others creates the feeling of an outsider looking in. The speaker in the poem becomes a voyeur looking at the photo of a family to which she does not belong.

Much of the distance seems to come from the speaker’s inability to fully inhabit her lineage. Her parents push her toward assimilation, but she longs for an understanding of her heritage. She grapples with the fact that when she travels to Vietnam, the people there immediately know she’s American, but in America, people ask her where she’s from. 

The unstable in-between of being simultaneously from and not from a country imposes obstacle after obstacle in her ability to tell her and her family’s story. She writes: “What will happen when I can tell my story in my mother tongue?”

To find an entry point to her story, she turns to photographs. The speaker reveals that before dying by suicide, her brother cut himself out of every family photo. He removed himself from the story she is trying to tell. 

In an attempt to fill in the gaps to understand her late brother, her estranged mother, and the family and country she can’t seem to keep in her grasp, she writes in and around the cut-out photos. 

One collage-poem features the cut-out figure prominently, with the words below it bolder than the words to its right: “I left this in.” Another version removes all of the figures, leaving only the setting they occupied, covered with a block of text. Another recreates the photo with text alone. 

I listened to “Root Fractures” on audiobook, which sounds counterintuitive for a book that relies heavily on visual motifs. But just as the photographs and collages expand the written word’s ability to build a story, the audiobook expanded the written word’s ability to deliver a story. 

The audiobook comes with a pdf of the visual poems. Ngyuen also describes the form of each visual poem before reading it. In cases where the visual poems include overlapping text, the audiobook is edited so that both pieces of text are played at the same time, allowing the poet to read in two voices, bringing the overlapping effect to life. 

This furthers the feeling of chaos and confusion established in the family and cultural dynamics of the book. It’s difficult to discern the root of the family’s collapse, just as it’s difficult to discern the words uttered simultaneously, the image beneath the wall of text. 

In the final poem of the “Đổi Mới” series, Ngyuen writes: “A storm can disperse seeds due to high altitudes, as war displaces parts to a whole. Between parent and child, coiled strands that sequence and distinguish their beings.”

“Root Fractures” is an example of visual art and poetry intersecting. Often, when people think of poetry, they think of old and stuffy language, or something impossible to understand. Using direct language, photographs and references from history and nature, Ngyuen beckons the reader into the life of leaving and returning, assembling a life with the parts found along the way.

“Root Fractures” is available for purchase at Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre, in store and online.

Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre, 647 E. Market Street, is a queer, Black, woman-owned independent bookstore located in Akron, designed to amplify and celebrate marginalized voices. Our catalog highlights, promotes, amplifies, celebrates and honors the work of Queer, Transgender, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (QTBIPOC) writers who are often excluded from traditional cultural, social and academic canons. Through curated collections of personal narratives of people from underrepresented groups, Elizabeth’s seeks to educate and re-shape the lens of readers as they see themselves and how they view the world.