Prose and Poetry

Abstract

Chair: David Palumbo-Liu Committee members: Crystal Parikh, Rob Wilson Winners: We Should Never Meet by Aimee Phan (Prose) The Year of the Snake by Lee Ann Roripaugh (Poetry) Honorable Mentions: The Temperature of this Water by Ishle Yi Park (Poetry) Children of a Fireland by Gary Pak (Prose) The panelists were deeply impressed by the meticulous and inventive style of Aimee Phan's novel, We Should Never Meet, by its daring use of montage and discontinuity in new and bracing fashions, and by its deep connection to both history and collective memory, that relocalize "Vietnam" and "America," and recreate as well the Pacific Rim. With narrative exactness and wry twists of plot as well as empathetic care and psycho-social wholeness and insight, We Should Never Meet plunges into a de-glamorized Orange County of trauma, risk, memory, and ambition, portraying social trajectories of orphaned and familial selfhood tracked up, down, and across from the Vietnam war years. Singular yet interlinked, each short story taps into lives narrated across the postwar Pacific diaspora linking continents, cultures, ethnicities, and generations into an entangled plight. Past and present, near and far, are forced to meet as Saigon war history becomes entangled into the postwar plights and promises of lives seeking emancipation and [End Page 206] redemption in the semi-prosperous yet blasted terrains and burgeoning suburbs of "Little Saigon." The text provides us a capaciously spun web of a place, a war, and a people attached to the name "Vietnam." The interlinking stories of this collection situate lives that span a past in Saigon that is never not present and the social minefields of Orange County's little Saigon diaspora. The ambition of this book's scope is impressively matched by the care that Phan brings to her depictions of the fragility and resilience of her subjects. Lee Ann Roripaugh's Year of the Snake is a work fabulous in its reach of imagination and exactitude of syntax, offering a Wyoming of pace-based intricacy where Japan and the American West collage and collude into unexpected intimacy, at times epiphany. Ethnicity becomes the starting point of worlded interrogation and interconnection, with "ghost selves" spiraling out from the poisons of trauma, fear, resentment, biological or cultural givens, as snake gets recreated by poetic metamorphosis into fable, butterfly "a winged scaled thing/ with an unappeasable hunger/ and unknown miles to go." This is a fine and expansive work that knows what poetry is about, enacts this, as a power of transformation and vision. Lee Ann Roripaugh offers a finely wrought portrait of an unexpected Wyoming, an American West that is the space of contact, of distancing, and of transformation. Even more to the point, these effective possibilities for re-imagining space and objects are ones that Roripaugh's poetry enacts. What unifies these two texts is their shared attention to both the stability and persistence of the local, and its malleability under specific historical pressure, and the linkages between place and persons.