Becoming Ghost: Poetry

by Cathy Linh Che

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Richard Siken uses his matter-of-fact voice to release the heartbreak and grief first introduced to him in his early years of childhood. Each poem is a room in the house that makes up a complex mind.

Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry
Ms. Magazine’s Best Poetry of 2024 and 2025

The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debut Split, Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker’s disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668088920
Publisher:	Washington Square Press
Publication date:	04/29/2025
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Split, winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History, and Becoming Ghost. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, and McSweeney’s and she has received awards from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She currently lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Becoming Ghost

I stand behind a one-way mirror.

My father sits in a room

interrogating himself.

Bright bulb shining

like the idea

of a daughter.



It looked just like the real

thing. The helicopters,

the fields, the smoke

which rose in colors,

the bullets blank,

but too real.

Coppola yelled, Action!,

and we dragged slowly

across the back of the screen,

miniature prisoners of war

to Robert Duvall’s

broad naked chest.

What you’ll never see

written into the credits

are our names.



Ghost of a daughter,

specter, spectator,

from a future

we could only dream of.

I’d never dreamt

that one day

you’d be my age

and too bitter

to talk to me.

I who gave every peso

to your mother,

who sewed coins

into the linings

of my pockets

so that you could eat

enough food

and grow taller

than either one of us.

I am asking you

to look me in the face

and say, Father.

I am

asking you

to see me.



Morning yawns and today

my father has deleted a daughter.

Today he’s blessed with two sons.

Today he may be haunted

by the grip of a friend

who died in his arms

but not the scent of a baby girl

he held years ago. Women,

he says, and spits.

There is plasm, he says,

and shrugs—and then

there is ectoplasm. What is a father

who has two sons? Happy,

he says with a toothpick pressed

between his thumb

and forefinger. Happy, he says,

looking into the mirror

and seeing no reflection.

Editorial Reviews

"A revelation. Harrowing, lyrical, surprisingly restrained at times while also fiercely visceral, Becoming Ghost is, above all, courageous in its willingness to confront the conflicts within the author’s own family without letting the world off the hook."
—Poetry Northwest

"Cathy Linh Che’s Becoming Ghost is a new masterpiece of American love lyric, in the vein of Rita Dove’s timeless Thomas and Beulah or Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. Love: 'To misunderstand / each other, but to stick around.' Love: 'I mapped our escape.' Love: 'I knew you in your bowl cut, the red car in the driveway, the lens of your father’s eye.' I’m getting goosebumps just typing. Che is a mighty poet, nimble across a variety of forms and voices, with a dazzling instinct for how one image, line, photograph, might illuminate the next. Becoming Ghost is an indelible reminder of all the people, known and unknown, who loved us enough to survive."
—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr and Pilgrim Bell

“Cathy Linh Che’s poetry vibrate with the rage and ache that accompany revisionist history work. The way she takes Coppola and the exploitative Apocalypse Now to task left me agape—these poems break the grammars of male and white-centric narratives.”
—Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures

"'We were diligent in our portrayal,' says a parent speaker. So, too, is this collection: diligent not toward facts but toward feeling, irony, hungry for absence and its meaning."
—Poetry Northwest's Spring 2025 Favorites

"Cathy Linh Che’s Becoming Ghost magnifies how the golden shovel form both buries and unearths a poem’s roots. Sentences unfold down Che’s line breaks, generating shadow scripts and ghost dialogues in a language hidden 'like gold poured into a molar or cotton gauze stuffed into a cheek.' These poems reconcile myth and history, inheritance and upheaval, reconfiguring family memoir as a vehicle for empathy, experimentation, and recovery. Becoming Ghost is a marvel of form and spirit."
—Terrance Hayes, author of So To Speak and American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

“‘Dance is a body’s refusal/to die,’ writes Cathy Linh Che in this gorgeous and searing second collection of poems, the culmination of a long-anticipated multivalence project—one that vivifies her parent’s experience being recruited as extras in the Coppola film Apocalypse Now. The poems in Becoming Ghost stun—they affirm and re-center those exiled from the rusted foundations of American mythology, they refuse to back away as they build new structures to reckon with not just our history but our present. These poems don’t just sing: they break my heart and re-affirm life in the same long and glorious breath.”
—Sally Wen Mao, author of The Kingdom of Surfaces and Ninetails

From the Publisher