Book of the Other: Small in Comparison

"Mixing cadenced prose, vernacular speech and legal grievance, Vietnamese American poet Truong Tran invokes the three questions that serve as framework for his classroom teaching and cultural identity, “what haunts you. what hunts you. what are you hunting.” Tran’s answers to these questions resist both the traditional poetic form and the performance of trauma. Repeatedly denied promotion at the college where he teaches, Tran bluntly asserts, “my living. cannot be literary. it does not have. the elevation of poetry … there is no creative. to this nonfiction.” Audacious and inspiring, Tran’s latest work shows how artistic expression can be consciously reinvented as an act of protest."