Linh Dinh is the author of two collections of stories and five books of poetry, most recently Jam Alerts and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy. He recently published a novel, Love Like Hate (2010). His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present and many other places. He’s also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (2001) and the translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker by Phan Nhien Hao (2006). His poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Icelandic and Finnish. He’s also published widely in Vietnamese.
There’s something wonderfully paradoxical about Linh Dinh’s poetry. The poems are full of surprise; from the first line I can never predict where they are going to end up nor how they will jump there. To call them wild seems like a gross understatement; they are more feral than wild. At the same time, they have an odd and wonderful sense of form. Like any great lyric, there’s an organic shapeliness about their music and movement. To put it another way, his poems reflect the depths of our culture’s banality and violence, but they never feel just like culture randomly talking. They feel effortless and inevitable.
As the poet Hai-Dang Phan wrote on his blog, “Linh’s is a poetry of revolt, even revolt against poetry’s own death, sounding a dissent against what’s truly revolting about the State of the Union.”
Or as Dinh puts it in his poem “Eating Morphemes”:
“No longer held or possessed
This word has wandered off
And can not be slotted in any
Long masticated
Macerated mess”
–December 2011