We Play a Game (Yale Series of Younger Poets #112)

Duy Doan, Carl Phillips (Foreword by)

$20.00

Publication Date: March 20th, 2018

Publisher:

Yale University Press

ISBN:

9780300230871

Pages:

104

Description

The 112th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores the Vietnamese-American experience

Duy Doan’s striking debut reveals the wide resonance of the collection’s unassuming title, in poems that explore—now with abundant humor, now with a deeply felt reserve—the ambiguities and tensions that mark our effort to know our histories, our loved ones, and ourselves. These are poems that draw from Doan’s experience as a Vietnamese-American while at the same time making a case for—and masterfully playing with—the fluidity of identity, history, and language. Nothing is alien to these poems: the Saigon of a mother’s dirge, the footballer Zinedine Zidane, an owl that “talks to his other self in the well”—all have a place in Doan’s far-reaching and intimately human art.

About the Author

Duy Doan is a Kundiman Fellow whose poetry has appeared in Poetry, Slate, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in Poetry from Boston University. Carl Phillips is the award-winning author of numerous books of poetry. In 2023 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Praise for We Play a Game (Yale Series of Younger Poets #112)

“These are intimate, mischievous poems, alternately wry, forthright, vulnerable, winking, and sincere.”—Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe

“Refreshingly unshowy, Doan’s collection is not an obvious choice for a big prize, but it reveals itself to be a deserving one.”—Publishers Weekly

“Bold, bright, yet decidedly unsettled and unsettling, this first collection . . . doesn’t so much explore Doan’s Vietnamese American experience as defy it.”—Library Journal (starred review), Top Spring Poetry

Winner of the 2019 Lamda Literary Awards, Bisexual Poetry category