The Truffle Eye

by Vaan Nguyen, Adriana X. Jacobs (Translator)

Overview

Vaan Nguyen has been described as “a veritable juggler of Hebrew,” a poet whose work radically remixes world classics and pop culture, the personal and the political, past and present. Born in 1982 in Israel to refugees of the Vietnam War, Nguyen’s debut collection The Truffle Eye addresses questions of identity and cultural legacy from what she has described as “points of emotion and shock.” Her poems travel far and wide, between Tel Aviv and Hanoi, taking in views of Manhattan, Paris, Milan, Salzburg, Pasadena and more. Through these movements, Nguyen reflects on how our lives take shape in the daily migrations we make between lovers, family, work, and the places we call home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938890826
Publisher:	Zephyr Press
Publication date:	03/09/2021
Series:	New Hebrew Poetry
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Vaan Nguyen is the author of the poetry collections The Truffle Eye (Ma’ayan Press, 2013) and Vain Ratio (Barchash, 2018). In addition to poetry, she has worked as an actress, journalist, and social activist. Translations of her poems have appeared in English and French, including in the collection Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (W. W. Norton, 2017). She currently lives in Jaffa and is writing her first novel.

Adriana X. Jacobs is the author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2018). Her translations have appeared in various print and online journals, including Gulf Coast, Seedings, World Literature Today, Poetry International, The Ilanot Review, and in the collection Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant (Wayne State UP, 2016). She is associate professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of Oxford.

Read an Excerpt

Packing Poem

In the rice bowl, green bananas and peels, dry castor beans in a jar,
feathers and mulch outside the window this is how they still gather evidence.

The chopsticks rest diagonally matching the movement of birds along a waterfall.
How do they stall their transmission and keep eating rice before their night migration?
Under the cover of delusions,
all I wanted was to warn everyone “there’s Armageddon”
and ask whether foreigners have inflatable boats.

And those paranoid, paranoid women, have nothing but these gallows for overloading muscles for stretching the body in the gym a woman lying naked in the sauna gossips under her breath and the thoughts escape her all at once either the meds work or the mind is numb but sometimes, if you concentrate, you can hear an airplane landing