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Split
"Split crosses borders, exposing truths and dreams, violations of body and mind, aligning them until the deep push-pull of silence and song become a bridge. And here we cross over into a landscape where beauty interrogates, and we encounter a voice that refuses to let us off the hook."—Yusef Komunyakaa
“Perhaps the writer’s most difficult task is to render the catastrophic linked non-stories that comprise transgenerational trauma. Cathy Linh Che’s collection Split accomplishes this nearly impossible challenge with uncommon grace and power. Each poem unwinds the cataclysm of personal wounding by making itself irresistibly beautiful.” —LA Review
In this stunning debut, we follow one woman's profoundly personal account of sexual violence against the backdrop of cultural conflict deftly illustrated through her parents' experiences of the Vietnam War, immigration, and its aftermath. By looking closely at landscape and psyche, Split explores what happens when deep trauma occurs and seeks to understand what it means to finally become whole.
Pomegranate
I open my chest and birds flock out.
In my mother's garden, the roses flare
toward the sun, but I am an arrow
pointing back.
I am Persephone,
a virgin abducted.
In the Underworld,
I starve a season
while the world wilts
into the ghost
of a summer backyard.
My hunger open and raw.
I lay next to a man
who did not love me&emdash;
my body a performance,
his body a single eye—
a director watching an actress
commanding her
to scintillate.
I was the clumsy acrobat.
When he came, I split open
like a pomegranate
and ate six of my own ruddy seeds.
I was the whipping boy.
Thorny, barbed wire
wound around a muscular heart.
Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles, CA. She has received awards from The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Hedgebrook, Kundiman, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace Residency, and Poets & Writers. She is a founding editor of Paperbag.
91 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 6, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
February 5, 2023
A powerful debut poetry collection about Cathy Linh Che’s experience of childhood sexual assault as well as her parents’ journey of war and immigration from Vietnam. The first section got my heart caught in my throat, as Che writes about the violation of her boundaries with heartbreaking clarity. The second section, foregrounded by Che’s compassion toward her parents’ experiences in Vietnam and as immigrants to the U.S., resonated with me as well. The third section centered on Che’s healing felt a bit sparse and abrupt to me; as someone who doesn’t often read or understand poetry I selfishly wanted more detail about this more restorative part of her life. Still, I’d recommend this collection to those interested by its synopsis.
Read
April 27, 2015This debut collection of poems has a thematic cohesiveness that makes it an unputdownable read, once you get into it. The book is divided into three sections. The first section vividly and unflinchingly recounts a young girl's experiences being sexually abused by an older cousin over a number of years.
Then he married -- and I was the flower girl
at the wedding
The second section is a kind of portrait gallery, in which the narrator presents loving character sketches of her parents, two working-class Vietnamese immigrants whose lives were also profoundly altered by violence: principally, the violence of the U.S.-Vietnam War of the 1970s, with its associated killings, imprisonments, kidnappings, and rapes. Parallels are drawn between the lived trauma depicted in the first section and the inherited trauma depicted in the second.
The third section touches on the narrator's life as an adult who is trying to move beyond these lived and inherited traumas and to supplant them with healthy adult experiences, including experiences of the romantic kind. The third section felt significantly shorter than the preceding two, like a fleeting cloudburst that ends rather abruptly, leaving the reader blinking in sudden dazzling sunlight. Still, the collection's finest bits of verbal ingenuity are to be found in this section, e.g.,
sudden light that blisters
into flurries of snow
and
In the distance
sit two lovers, full of holes,
waiting to be wrung out.
The inherent linguistic brilliance of these snippets leaves this reader confident that Che's future books, whatever their subject matter, will contain something worth reading.
Although Split cannot legitimately be termed an "easy" read due to its heavy subject matter, there is still something "easy" about the experience of reading it, for the poet offers herself to the reader as a generous-spirited and dependable guide, holding the reader's hand and gently leading him/her through the poems. Major themes are signposted with recurring motif-words, the most prominent two being "split" (a word with connotations of cutting and violence, as well as connotations of psychological disturbances such as the dissociative disorders that frequently take hold after trauma) and "patterns" (a word that was first imbued with dark undertones by an earlier war poet, Amy Lowell, and is similarly freighted with darkness and foreboding in Split).
All these poems are written in free verse, but the poet plays intelligently with line length and stanza length so as to enhance her poems' meanings. Many of the poems are composed of stanzas that contain a fixed number of lines (Dante-esque tercets are especially favored), only to suddenly throw at the reader a stanza of truncated length in a sort of analog of musical syncopation that drives the images home.
Then he married -- and I was the flower girl
at the wedding
The second section is a kind of portrait gallery, in which the narrator presents loving character sketches of her parents, two working-class Vietnamese immigrants whose lives were also profoundly altered by violence: principally, the violence of the U.S.-Vietnam War of the 1970s, with its associated killings, imprisonments, kidnappings, and rapes. Parallels are drawn between the lived trauma depicted in the first section and the inherited trauma depicted in the second.
The third section touches on the narrator's life as an adult who is trying to move beyond these lived and inherited traumas and to supplant them with healthy adult experiences, including experiences of the romantic kind. The third section felt significantly shorter than the preceding two, like a fleeting cloudburst that ends rather abruptly, leaving the reader blinking in sudden dazzling sunlight. Still, the collection's finest bits of verbal ingenuity are to be found in this section, e.g.,
sudden light that blisters
into flurries of snow
and
In the distance
sit two lovers, full of holes,
waiting to be wrung out.
The inherent linguistic brilliance of these snippets leaves this reader confident that Che's future books, whatever their subject matter, will contain something worth reading.
Although Split cannot legitimately be termed an "easy" read due to its heavy subject matter, there is still something "easy" about the experience of reading it, for the poet offers herself to the reader as a generous-spirited and dependable guide, holding the reader's hand and gently leading him/her through the poems. Major themes are signposted with recurring motif-words, the most prominent two being "split" (a word with connotations of cutting and violence, as well as connotations of psychological disturbances such as the dissociative disorders that frequently take hold after trauma) and "patterns" (a word that was first imbued with dark undertones by an earlier war poet, Amy Lowell, and is similarly freighted with darkness and foreboding in Split).
All these poems are written in free verse, but the poet plays intelligently with line length and stanza length so as to enhance her poems' meanings. Many of the poems are composed of stanzas that contain a fixed number of lines (Dante-esque tercets are especially favored), only to suddenly throw at the reader a stanza of truncated length in a sort of analog of musical syncopation that drives the images home.
April 25, 2014
“To be a daughter, a survivor, and a poet are all aligned in the need “to rewrite everything,” a need that [Cathy Linh Che] navigates with brutality and tenderness, devastation and irrepressible endurance.” —Publishers Weekly (http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1...)
“Cathy Linh Che’s first collection, Split, is a brave, delicate, and terrifying account of what we do to each other. Here’s a voice that has to speak. Split crosses borders, exposing truths and dreams, violations of body and mind, aligning them until the deep push-pull of silence and song become a bridge. And here we cross over into a landscape where beauty interrogates, and we encounter a voice that refuses to let us off the hook.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa
“In her debut collection Cathy Linh Che summons forth a daughter-self that jolts, blazes. It’s a voice that orbits a harrowing girlhood and a war-torn Vietnam. It’s a voice that veers into tenderness and ferocity. It’s an exquisite voice. Line after line burns with pictorial verve, melodic grace. This voice, this daughter-self, is a stunning and scorching performance.”
—Eduardo C. Corral
“Cathy Linh Che’s debut examines the complex ways in which the past imperils our present. In these heartbreaking poems, rape and abuse are not private traumas, but a terrible inheritance that continues through generations. Here, the Vietnam War becomes a psychic backdrop against which one family still struggles to heal, reliving past cultural wounds that traumatize, yet never define it.”
—Paisley Rekdal
“Cathy Linh Che’s first collection, Split, is a brave, delicate, and terrifying account of what we do to each other. Here’s a voice that has to speak. Split crosses borders, exposing truths and dreams, violations of body and mind, aligning them until the deep push-pull of silence and song become a bridge. And here we cross over into a landscape where beauty interrogates, and we encounter a voice that refuses to let us off the hook.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa
“In her debut collection Cathy Linh Che summons forth a daughter-self that jolts, blazes. It’s a voice that orbits a harrowing girlhood and a war-torn Vietnam. It’s a voice that veers into tenderness and ferocity. It’s an exquisite voice. Line after line burns with pictorial verve, melodic grace. This voice, this daughter-self, is a stunning and scorching performance.”
—Eduardo C. Corral
“Cathy Linh Che’s debut examines the complex ways in which the past imperils our present. In these heartbreaking poems, rape and abuse are not private traumas, but a terrible inheritance that continues through generations. Here, the Vietnam War becomes a psychic backdrop against which one family still struggles to heal, reliving past cultural wounds that traumatize, yet never define it.”
—Paisley Rekdal
March 18, 2018
I think this is great poetry but it was too triggering for me. Or maybe it is triggering because it is great poetry. Either way, I had to read it in small doses and only when my emotional reservoirs are full.
January 24, 2019
A beautiful collection of poems that weave trauma and humanity seamlessly. Some poems felt like blessings, others felt like a gut punch. I'll be thinking about these for a while to come.
August 30, 2016
THIS REVIEW FIRST APPEARED IN THE COMPULSIVE READER
Split by Cathy Linh Che (Alice James Books, 2014), is an honest piece of literature. There is no need for Che to prove her talent as a poet. The poems in Split do this and more. Che uses the pen as a mirror. What she sees—including significant events that impact her personal and familial life—she puts on paper in ways that approach mastery of the art of poetry.
The title poem recounts the interaction between a girl, who “wears a side-part/that splits her hair/into two uneven planes,” and a group of American soldiers during the Vietnam War: “With scissor-fingers/they snip the air/point at their helmets/and then at her hair” (23). The girl escapes the village with hair intact and grows to become Che’s mother. Another female villager, and many other victims of sexual violence during the war, was not as fortunate.
…a village girl
was raped by a soldier
in a dried-out gully.
__________________
My mother doesn’t say,
It could have been me
But instead:
The girl lived
and could never
marry (My mother still dreams of the war, 47).
The loss of innocence and the futility of attempts to reclaim it in totality are poignant themes in the collection. Che laments, “We begin whole then slowly deflate” (In what way does the room map out violence, 6) and “I was a border and he crossed/I fill up with fog in the summer heat/His eyes were cool and lanced through me” (ibid 8). In the same vein, Che reminds us that art can be traumatic because some experiences that inform it are traumatic in nature.
It was winter—my cousin lay on top—
my brother would not leave, watching
even as the toaster pinged—I was four—
I was eight—I was twelve—
Then he married—and I was the flower girl
At the wedding (ibid 10).
The above scene relates that sexual consummation of marital vows is void of innocence as regard the flower girl because the choice to freely engage in sex (i.e. for the first time) was violently taken from her. The wedding is not celebratory for her but serves as reminder of the death of what it means to be a whole self, due to rape.
Che calls attention to the inherent strength of the ruptured self. In Daughter, she writes, “I am not meant to be desolate/an evening pulled apart like smoke” (51). For her, the practice of poetry is intricately linked to the art of survival. She seeks “….redemption/An arrow that joins a split heart” (Brooklyn Interior, 77) and “I want to be this simple again/A body diving under water while waves scan over” (Object Permanence: Sea, 69).
Che’s voice is audible throughout the collection, even though the poems deal with subjects, war and sexual abuse, that work to silence the voice of their victims. My Mother upon Hearing News of Her Mother’s Death is one of the hallmark poems of the collection. Che, after describing the forceful acting out of grief, including a thunderous scream, on the part of her mother in response to the news, writes:
I was drowning in it. I was swirled in. I leapt into
her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the
remnants of my former life. I ate the food she ate and drank
the milk she drank. I grew until I crowded the furnishings.
I edged out her organs, her swollen heart. I grew up and out
so large that I became a woman, wearing my mother’s skin (46).
Che identifies with her mother’s grief but the reader gets the sense that she is fully aware of another self that is her own and that the same is true in lieu of all that has happened to her. This doing reminds me of Lucille Clifton’s “Come celebrate with me/that every day something has tried/to kill me/and has failed” (from her Blessing of the Boats).
It is believed that reading creates empathy. This is true for certain pieces of literature and Split by Cathy Linh Che is in this category. That is why it is worth reading. It will make you a better person.
Split by Cathy Linh Che (Alice James Books, 2014), is an honest piece of literature. There is no need for Che to prove her talent as a poet. The poems in Split do this and more. Che uses the pen as a mirror. What she sees—including significant events that impact her personal and familial life—she puts on paper in ways that approach mastery of the art of poetry.
The title poem recounts the interaction between a girl, who “wears a side-part/that splits her hair/into two uneven planes,” and a group of American soldiers during the Vietnam War: “With scissor-fingers/they snip the air/point at their helmets/and then at her hair” (23). The girl escapes the village with hair intact and grows to become Che’s mother. Another female villager, and many other victims of sexual violence during the war, was not as fortunate.
…a village girl
was raped by a soldier
in a dried-out gully.
__________________
My mother doesn’t say,
It could have been me
But instead:
The girl lived
and could never
marry (My mother still dreams of the war, 47).
The loss of innocence and the futility of attempts to reclaim it in totality are poignant themes in the collection. Che laments, “We begin whole then slowly deflate” (In what way does the room map out violence, 6) and “I was a border and he crossed/I fill up with fog in the summer heat/His eyes were cool and lanced through me” (ibid 8). In the same vein, Che reminds us that art can be traumatic because some experiences that inform it are traumatic in nature.
It was winter—my cousin lay on top—
my brother would not leave, watching
even as the toaster pinged—I was four—
I was eight—I was twelve—
Then he married—and I was the flower girl
At the wedding (ibid 10).
The above scene relates that sexual consummation of marital vows is void of innocence as regard the flower girl because the choice to freely engage in sex (i.e. for the first time) was violently taken from her. The wedding is not celebratory for her but serves as reminder of the death of what it means to be a whole self, due to rape.
Che calls attention to the inherent strength of the ruptured self. In Daughter, she writes, “I am not meant to be desolate/an evening pulled apart like smoke” (51). For her, the practice of poetry is intricately linked to the art of survival. She seeks “….redemption/An arrow that joins a split heart” (Brooklyn Interior, 77) and “I want to be this simple again/A body diving under water while waves scan over” (Object Permanence: Sea, 69).
Che’s voice is audible throughout the collection, even though the poems deal with subjects, war and sexual abuse, that work to silence the voice of their victims. My Mother upon Hearing News of Her Mother’s Death is one of the hallmark poems of the collection. Che, after describing the forceful acting out of grief, including a thunderous scream, on the part of her mother in response to the news, writes:
I was drowning in it. I was swirled in. I leapt into
her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the
remnants of my former life. I ate the food she ate and drank
the milk she drank. I grew until I crowded the furnishings.
I edged out her organs, her swollen heart. I grew up and out
so large that I became a woman, wearing my mother’s skin (46).
Che identifies with her mother’s grief but the reader gets the sense that she is fully aware of another self that is her own and that the same is true in lieu of all that has happened to her. This doing reminds me of Lucille Clifton’s “Come celebrate with me/that every day something has tried/to kill me/and has failed” (from her Blessing of the Boats).
It is believed that reading creates empathy. This is true for certain pieces of literature and Split by Cathy Linh Che is in this category. That is why it is worth reading. It will make you a better person.
June 7, 2016
See full review @ my blog: https://pintxosylibros.com/2016/05/16...
Each poem opens up, through immediate details that force us to look ever-closer, the interior life of: a daughter, whose Vietnamese parents fled during the war; a girl who grew up in L.A., where she suffered the trauma of rape and abuse and got caught in the sprouting of more trauma from past trauma; a woman who still questions which parts of her remain embodied by that young girl (My story’s an arrow/ pointing back, she writes in “Story,” to when/ he curved my palm/ around his sex….My child-hand/ has not grown up/since then).
And yet, where you might expect to find an absolute lack of hope or light, Che writes with such incredible warmth.
Each poem opens up, through immediate details that force us to look ever-closer, the interior life of: a daughter, whose Vietnamese parents fled during the war; a girl who grew up in L.A., where she suffered the trauma of rape and abuse and got caught in the sprouting of more trauma from past trauma; a woman who still questions which parts of her remain embodied by that young girl (My story’s an arrow/ pointing back, she writes in “Story,” to when/ he curved my palm/ around his sex….My child-hand/ has not grown up/since then).
And yet, where you might expect to find an absolute lack of hope or light, Che writes with such incredible warmth.
October 14, 2018
as w a lot of poetry books i think i need to reread this one a couple more times before i get a strong idea of what i feel about this collection, but i loved it so much...the only thing was that it was so painful sometimes, the whole first part was so difficult to go through because of the subject matter. the work reads smoothly and after just one read i can't think of any strangely written lines at all. really, really beautiful and raw, reminds me of ocean vuong.
"my story // is a series // of pent-up men."
"my story // is a series // of pent-up men."
November 4, 2015
This is a brutal and uncomfortable collection.
It's very good and really powerful, but it focuses on the colonisation of the female body in ways that should make you uncomfortable, that should disturb you.
It doesn't even make sense to bring enjoyment into this collection, because I can't imagine someone enjoying many of these poems, but I think that's the point. To make you look at the horror, given to you in simple and clear language.
It's very good and really powerful, but it focuses on the colonisation of the female body in ways that should make you uncomfortable, that should disturb you.
It doesn't even make sense to bring enjoyment into this collection, because I can't imagine someone enjoying many of these poems, but I think that's the point. To make you look at the horror, given to you in simple and clear language.
July 25, 2016
Wow. This is terrifying and so fine. The opening sections, recounting trauma and an evil cousin, among other things, is really wrenching. As the book shifts to account for parents and grandparents, cultures and weather, it gains so much depth and rhythm, becomes a personal anthropology that really resonated with me. Brave and important and so tightly focused work.
August 20, 2016
A brave contemporary voice and a harrowing book of poems. Look into the mirror darkly. Persephone and the survivor's poetry of survival. Violations and violence committed against the colonized bodies of Vietnam's daughters. Will spring flowers come to blossom again from broken/dead/split-open seeds?
August 13, 2024
A title can inform the way you read a book. So what's the meaning of "Split"? Is it to break apart, to depart, to share? Like any poet worth their salt, Cathy Link Che draws on all the meanings. Her book, which won the Kundiman Poetry Prize in 2012, is divided into three sections which all seem to acknowledge a break, an escape, and an offering, threaded together by a harrowing through-line: the opening verses vividly detail childhood sexual abuse and its aftermath; a middle part looks back at parents inevitably seen through the lens of childhood trauma; and a final grouping takes us to a present-day in which the reflections are generally more philosophical and forward-facing. The penultimate poem -- the epic "Letters to Doc" -- returns to the therapist's room where the patient confesses "I want to rewrite everything" but you can't do that in life but as Che notes. In "Gardenia," the subsequent and powerful verse which follows, the book ends with "I can crown myself / with my own life." I'd say the entire collection is a testament to that belief, a brilliant reshaping of the raw material of life into something wrenchingly beautiful.
May 12, 2024
I'm experimenting with trying to read poetry and two other poetry books I tried I couldn't finish. This one grabbed me, and I read it cover to cover in one sitting. Maybe I liked it because it sort of resembled a novel. The poems were each cohesive and didn't leave me wondering how they got from point A to point B. And besides that the collection together told a story.
The story itself was upsetting. It followed, from a first-person perspective, the life of a Vietnamese woman who was repeatedly raped by her cousin as a child, and who also learns about the horrible traumas that her parents went through. I found it gripping and powerful.
The story itself was upsetting. It followed, from a first-person perspective, the life of a Vietnamese woman who was repeatedly raped by her cousin as a child, and who also learns about the horrible traumas that her parents went through. I found it gripping and powerful.
March 3, 2025
5/5
Cathy Lin Che, I love you and your poems, and the way that you highlight narratives that are glossed over in mainstream media. So many of the poems within this collection made me cry, as I felt the pain from the words that you did or didn't say.
Truly, these poems were works of art that perfectly encompassed the complex sentiments of being an Asian-American child of immigrants, and the family trauma that can follow you from overseas. I am not a big poetry person (and I have NEVER finished a poetry book before in my life) yet I voraciously read all of these.
I think this will be difficult to reread but its impact continues to remain.
Cathy Lin Che, I love you and your poems, and the way that you highlight narratives that are glossed over in mainstream media. So many of the poems within this collection made me cry, as I felt the pain from the words that you did or didn't say.
Truly, these poems were works of art that perfectly encompassed the complex sentiments of being an Asian-American child of immigrants, and the family trauma that can follow you from overseas. I am not a big poetry person (and I have NEVER finished a poetry book before in my life) yet I voraciously read all of these.
I think this will be difficult to reread but its impact continues to remain.
November 2, 2018
A beautiful collection full of stark contradictions - tenderness and violence, light and dark, innocence and experience - in which the poet explores what it means to be a survivor, a daughter, a writer. This is poetry as healing. The poet uses similes so effective the effect is haunting: "his tongue / like a slug / that turned/ in my mouth" (Story). This poetry says as much in its holes, gaps and lacks as it does in its more concrete images and events. A stunning and brave collection.
January 29, 2022
The author is absolutely fearless. I cant even describe this book, there were moments where I thought I couldnt possibly understand a topic as it approached, but I'd start reading and find myself nodding with the emotions. Its like the author's descriptions are so visceral, with such tangible detail I find myself relating with the experiences, coming from very different scenarios in my life. This is an incredible book.
March 3, 2022
"My Mother Upon Hearing News of Her Mother's Death"
"...
the torrents like iron ropes you could climb up, only I
couldn't. I was drowning in it. I was swirled in. I leapt into
her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the
remnants of my former life. I ate the food she ate and drank
the milk she drank. I grew until I crowded the furnishings.
I edged out her organs, her swollen heart. I grew up and out
so large that I became a woman, wearing my mother's skin." (46)
"...
the torrents like iron ropes you could climb up, only I
couldn't. I was drowning in it. I was swirled in. I leapt into
her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the
remnants of my former life. I ate the food she ate and drank
the milk she drank. I grew until I crowded the furnishings.
I edged out her organs, her swollen heart. I grew up and out
so large that I became a woman, wearing my mother's skin." (46)
Read
December 18, 2023July 1975.
While waiting to escape,
my mother hid in Nha Trang
and listened for the signal.
A late-night tip-off.
My mother was jailed
with the others.
She sold her wedding ring
to find her way
back to my father.
The humidity thick on her skin,
a single change of clothes
on her back.
Read in one sitting at Nautilus Books, Providence.
While waiting to escape,
my mother hid in Nha Trang
and listened for the signal.
A late-night tip-off.
My mother was jailed
with the others.
She sold her wedding ring
to find her way
back to my father.
The humidity thick on her skin,
a single change of clothes
on her back.
Read in one sitting at Nautilus Books, Providence.
September 24, 2017
Heavy, haunting...undeniably excellent poetry
February 11, 2020
Bloodlines was my favorite.
May 24, 2022
absolutely incredible. heart-wrenching and devastating and beautiful
Read
May 26, 2022very moving and profound, very expressive and im very grateful that this book is out there for people
November 22, 2022
A really lovely and powerful collection.
June 1, 2023
Asian Readathon 2023.
July 6, 2023
extraordinary & devastating, distills the parts of trauma that feel most impossible to articulate, somehow.
June 4, 2025
My god
May 10, 2017
Picked it off a Venice Boardwalk bookstore and couldn't let it go. These poems are convulsive, unforgiving, dangerous, healing.. and brings together both the harrowing and the beautiful aftermaths of violence and violation committed against a body (and all the many identities, nations and gender, embodied in it).. across generations, across cultures, across age... reads from beginning to end like one seamless stormy symphony. Im dying for more female Asian poets like her.
October 28, 2016
TW: child sexual assault.
One mark of a good poet is the ability to take life's horrible things and make them into something beautiful, powerful, or some combination thereof. No arrangement of pretty words will make the speaker of Split's poems any less violated. However, her ability to shape her own narrative into structures and meanings of her own choosing is proof that it's possible to take your story back and decide for yourself how you will proceed going forward.
The narrative voice is clear and calm: these are things that have happened to me, and to my family. This is how we handled them. This is how we live now. The titular splits are, obviously, before and after, past and present. The speaker weaves her own story with that of her parents, who escaped Vietnam and settled in California, like many others did during the conflict. Much as the speaker mourns her past self, her mother mourns her past life. A child, and a country, raped and spoiled, making it necessary to flee.
Medium to large poetry collections should have this book, particularly on the west coast, but all collections concerned with purchasing the best of contemporary poetry will want this too. Keep an eye out for Cathy Linh Che, as I've no doubt this is just the beginning of a strong poetic career.
One mark of a good poet is the ability to take life's horrible things and make them into something beautiful, powerful, or some combination thereof. No arrangement of pretty words will make the speaker of Split's poems any less violated. However, her ability to shape her own narrative into structures and meanings of her own choosing is proof that it's possible to take your story back and decide for yourself how you will proceed going forward.
The narrative voice is clear and calm: these are things that have happened to me, and to my family. This is how we handled them. This is how we live now. The titular splits are, obviously, before and after, past and present. The speaker weaves her own story with that of her parents, who escaped Vietnam and settled in California, like many others did during the conflict. Much as the speaker mourns her past self, her mother mourns her past life. A child, and a country, raped and spoiled, making it necessary to flee.
Medium to large poetry collections should have this book, particularly on the west coast, but all collections concerned with purchasing the best of contemporary poetry will want this too. Keep an eye out for Cathy Linh Che, as I've no doubt this is just the beginning of a strong poetic career.
June 13, 2015
Cathy Linh Che brings a beautiful dignity to the pain she has suffered in her own life as well as the pain inherited through and seen in her parents from Vietnam in this collection of poems. She is meticulous in choosing just the right words and the poems read in a slow but measured cadence. I particularly enjoyed "Story," "Self-Portrait in Summer I,"Mother upon Hearing News of Her Mother's Death," and "The Future Therapist Asks About Rape."
Her sense of sound in her poems -- especially in "San Fransisco Poems or Letters to Jack" and the second "Brooklyn Interior" -- is enviable, as is her fluid movement through free-verse to prose poems and back again. This is a collection that works well as individual poems -- the strongest, the most vulnerable and beautiful being "Pomegranate" and "Letters to Doc" -- but is even stronger as a whole collection of poems.
Her sense of sound in her poems -- especially in "San Fransisco Poems or Letters to Jack" and the second "Brooklyn Interior" -- is enviable, as is her fluid movement through free-verse to prose poems and back again. This is a collection that works well as individual poems -- the strongest, the most vulnerable and beautiful being "Pomegranate" and "Letters to Doc" -- but is even stronger as a whole collection of poems.
February 22, 2015
Don't be fooled by the simplistic poems.
Cathy tells stories that haunt you long after you have turned the page.
Cathy tells stories that haunt you long after you have turned the page.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews