A Plucked Zither

Late in her second collection, Phuong T. Vuong reintroduces herself:

Please, go ahead. Say my name and I’ll laugh. Who’s backward now.

It’s typical of Vuong’s polyphonic poems to harmonize self-portraiture with teasing instruction, kind laughter with deadpanned critique. Typical, too, for one to sprout from a minute linguistic seed, a phrase in English or Vietnamese. Scrutinizing her name—written, following Vietnamese convention, as last name, middle name, first name—Vuong reveals a subjectivity "framed" between lineages: Vương, a storied family name, full of ghosts “rushing for you”; Thảo, a unique "Qualifier," representing “My self”; and Phương, a "first person" name that "comes last," arriving after centuries of ancestors and their labor: “The masses, the herds, their hands, // babies." There’s no naming this poet without appreciating all the above: “Know me as of others: / Vương Thảo Phương.”

“[O]thers,” in A Plucked Zither, includes Vuong’s many inspirations: the Vietnamese singer Trịnh Công Sơn, Black and Latinx pathbreakers, Asian American monuments and mirrors. In “Fifth Grade English,” Vuong reenters the classroom scene of Li-Young Lee’s anthology piece “Persimmons”; she makes similar music from mishearings (“library not liberry,” a pun packed with “hidden fruits”) while also remembering “the first / Vietnamese teacher I had,” who pronounced her name perfectly and “even clarified inflections”: “Is it Phương or Phượng?” “Home-cooking” takes on a convention-rich subgenre, the food poem:

sssssss says the sautéed shallots
shrimp and pork slices       dress up
boiling broth with leaves
mom bangs pots       until
glimmering deep purple-black broth
grease spot stars
unveils vegetable soup     galaxy

Recipes, cookbook-quality close-ups, synesthetic scrumptiousness: it’s like comfort food, satisfyingly familiar. But with that last word “galaxy,” the poem lifts off, leaving the kitchen behind for unbounded sublimity.

Poems like these are as two-sided as Vuong’s title instrument: a zither plucked and plucked, played upon and snatched away. For every touch of warmth and musicality, she admits something of the unknown or apparitional. A meditation “On Generational Memory” ends with the sentence “No, one forgets”; for the cliché she’s overturning, remove the comma. “i’ve given up the dream / of knowing more in my first language,” Vuong rues, but her poems offer compensations possible nowhere else:

here i study
            new weighty connotations
as if at home in my foreignness—