Linh Dinh

Roaming the country by bus and train, on a budget and without any institutional support, Linh Dinh set out to document, in words and pictures, what life is like for people. From Los Angeles, Cheyenne, Portland, and New Orleans, to Jackson and Wolf Point--Linh walked miles and miles through unfamiliar neighborhoods, talking to whoever would talk to him: the homeless living in tent cities, the peddlers, the protestors, the public preachers, the prostitutes. With the uncompromising eye of a Walker Evans or a Dorothea Lange, and the indomitable, forthright prose of a modern-day Nelson Algren or James Agee, Dinh documents the appalling and the absurd with warmth and honesty, giving voice to America's often forgotten citizens and championing the awesome strength it takes to survive for those on the bottom. Growing out of a photo and political writing blog Linh has maintained since 2009, "Postcards from the End of America" is an unflinching diary of what Linh sees as the accelerating collapse of America. Tracking the economic, political, and social unraveling--from the casinos to the abandoned factories and over all the sidewalks in between--with a poet's incisive tongue, Linh shows us the uncanny power of the people in the face of societal devastation. "From the eBook edition.""

Getting back to the theme of writing from the outside, I published this in the American Poetry Review in 01/01/2004, " I've come to realize that I much prefer to live on the periphery of the English language, so that I can steer clear of the tyranny of its suffocating center. In this sense, I am a quintessential American. A Unapoet, I like to homestead just beyond the long reach of Washington ... ] Hearing the rapid syllables of a foreign language, a bigot is infuriated because he's reduced to the status of an infant. Poets, on the other hand, should welcome all opportunities to become disoriented. To not know what's happening forces one to become more attentive and to fill in the blanks. Hence, poetry." (Linh Dinh, from the Interview with Tahseen Alkhateeb)

Praise for Linh Dinh: " Linh] Dinh's abrupt epiphanies mix A.D.D. with Thoreau's economy, Calvino's globe-trotting, and a pungent eroticism reminiscent of Kawabata's "Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.""--"The Village Voice"" Linh Dinh's "Blood and Soap"] owes a certain debt to Jorge Luis Borges, but uses Borgesian metafiction and genre-bending to depict a sense of absurdity, confusion, and displacement peculiar to being a contemporary world citizen."--Matthew Sharpe, "The Brooklyn Rail"" Linh] Dinh reveals a refreshing sense of utter irreverence and experimental fun."--"AsianWeek"Protagonists Kim Lan and Hoang Long marry in Saigon during the Vietnam War, uniting in a setting that allows Linh Dinh's dark, deadpan humor to flourish. Describing his mushrooming cast of characters in unsentimental and sometimes absurd ways, Dinh embraces contradictions with the surreal exuberance of Matthew Sharpe and the stylistic elan of Italo Calvino.A recipient of the Pew Fellowship, the David T. Wong Fellowship, and the Asian American Literary Award, Linh Dinh is the author of two collections of stories, "Fake House" and "Blood and Soap"; and four books of poems, "All Around What Empties Out," "American Tatts," "Borderless Bodies," and "Jam Alerts." He is editor of the anthologies "Night, Again" and "Three Vietnamese Poets." "Love Like Hate" is his first novel.

JAM ALERTS is the newest title from this important and prolific poet. "Linh Dinh is one of the most consistently surprising writers around. One can find sources & roots for his writing, explain the sources of surrealism through the presence, say, of the French in Vietnam (tho they were driven out a decade before he was born), note that he is hardly the only good or succesful Vietnamese American poety, let alone the only poet to come from a working class background, yet he is not writing 'about' or even 'toward' nor 'from' any one of these contexts so much as he is through themthey are lenses, filters that condition his perspective on everyday life. Imagine what any other poet with this strong a sense of form would have to become in order to write such poetry...Linh is writing straightforward poetry, but from a perspective shared by almost no one else. This kind of exile is far deeper than mere geography"Ron Silliman.

Blood and Soap is a breakthrough collection of modern-day fables from a wildly inventive American writer whose fiction has been called "terse and edgy" (Booklist) and "vividly imagined" (Kirkus Reviews). Dinh's gift is for constructing, in the manner of Italo Calvino, simple narratives that quickly frame larger questions; with a poet's timing, the author builds his stories to the one or few climactic sentences that brand them with unforgettable meaning. In one tale, a Vietnamese boy's self-guided, haphazard study of English gives way to a meditation on the universality of language: "Everything seems chaotic at first, but nothing is chaotic. One can read anything: ants crawling on the ground; pimples on a face; trees in a forest." In another story, a man opens a newspaper and sees the photograph of a man he may have murdered, which he impulsively clips, only to feel that in doing so he unwittingly has sealed his crime: "As soon as I finished, I realized what I had done: by cutting my father's likeness out of the newspaper, I had removed him from the world." The collection crescendoes in displays of raw creative power, as in "Eight Plots," a rapid-fire of three- and four-sentence summaries, and the brilliant, impressionistic " "Blood and Soap is an arresting collection from one of a small number of writers on the vanguard of American fiction.

With nine stories set in the United States and twelve in Vietnam, Fake House explores the weird, atrocious, fond, and ongoing intimacies between these two countries. The politics of race and sex anchor these stories, as Dinh's characters try to make sense of life in a post-Vietnam War world, dignity here lies in the ways one faces the conflicts within, and those out in the world. Marginal souls in two cultures linked by a complicated past, the characters in Fake House are often driven by misdirected intensity and anger.