Nam Le: 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

Fifteen years after his award-winning collection of stories, The Boat, Nam Le returns to his great themes of identity and representation in a breakthrough book of poetry.

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, says Nam, a Vietnamese refugee to Australia, is “the book I’ve been writing my whole life”. This epic collection is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity and the violence of identity that honours the conventions of diasporic literature before shattering the form itself.

Join Nam in conversation with poet Felicity Plunkett to discuss his virtuosic poetry debut.