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.

2025 National Book Award Finalist
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.