book of the other: small in comparison

by Truong Tran

150pp | November 2021 | Paperback | ISBN 978-1-885030-75-7

A piercing, furious examination of the devastation wrought on a life by institutional platitudes put in the service of unexamined privilege, Truong Tran’s provocative collection of poetry, prose, and essays, book of the other, is a stunning rebuttal to the idea of anti-Asian racism as a victimless crime. Written with a compulsion for lucidity that transforms outrage into clarity, book of the other resists the luxury of metaphor to write about the experience of being shut out, shut down, and othered as an immigrant, refugee, and queer man. What emerges from Tran’s sharp-eyed experiments in language and form is an achingly beautiful acknowledgement of the rationalizations, disavowals, and estrangement from self forced upon those seduced by the promise of color-blind acceptance and the rigorous, step-by-step recollection of the love and work needed to find one’s way home to oneself.

praise

“This is documentation, a file on whiteness, sousveillance—this is the footage, the eye’s iris surrounded by white, seeing itself surrounded. This is the account of a brown someone testifying after being told—again—to shut up: to refrain. No: Truong Tran makes refrains, repeats: these are the facts. An uncompromising rebuke of the white “Why?” —the alibi holed in that question, the abstracting action of its janky tautological innocence. “Why?” The question wielded as an assertion. Why period. That period appears, over and over, in Book of the Other,  a tether—in whose hand, to hold what back, to keep what there? Right there. Punctuation as policing—that which makes a sentence a sentence. That which beats a poem into a statement. This is witness of whiteness at the scenes of what it refuses to name crimes. These are the facts. Only one name given, and even fewer fucks. This book is necessary—terribly so. Yesterday, today, and for the foreseeable future.”

– Douglas Kearney, Author of Buck Studies and Sho

“Truong Tran has created a deeply moving book of poetry that exists beyond the domain of a purely literary experience. Because: How do you survive what’s not meant to be survivable? This is not a manual. It’s a memory. It’s a way through.”

– Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue

“In a time of ‘anti-Asian hate,’ when Asian elders are attacked and sometimes killed in the street merely for existing, Truong Tran takes personal incident and event and refracts them through meditation, re-telling and re-flection to echolocate links between exterior scarring between “merely” existing—and the interior life.”

– Sesshu Foster, author of City of the Future

“Truong’s art brings us a language by way of objects.”

– Mary Burger, Participle Truong Tran | ARTICIPLE

“Truong’s work is full of generosity, honesty, passion, experimentation, excitement – everything that keeps poetry alive.”

– Poetry International Archives Truong Tran (poet) – USA – Poetry International

“Brilliant, disarmingly honest, and deeply insightful”

– Sam Hamill, founder of Copper Canyon Press

“Tran is…  establishing something new in American culture as well as in American literature”

– Lyn Heijinian, author of The Language of Inquiry