Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees
(W.W. Norton)
Fifty years after the Vietnam War, this anthology by descendants of Vietnam veterans and refugees—American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese Diaspora, Hmong, Australian, and others—confronts war and its aftermath. What emerges is an affecting portrait of the effects of war and family—an intercultural, generational dialogue on silence, memory, landscape, imagination, Agent Orange, displacement, postwar trauma, and the severe realities that are carried home. Including such acclaimed voices as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Karen Russell, Terrance Hayes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Nick Flynn, and Ocean Vuong, Inheriting the War enriches the discourse of the Vietnam War and provides a collective conversation that attempts to transcend the recursion of history.
“Each unique work in Inheriting the War embraces a collective that aims to engage through some daring and passionate truths calibrated by bravery.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa, from the foreword
Between Here and Monkey Mountain: Poems
(Sheep Meadow Press)
“In Between Here and Monkey Mountain McClung creates a space where love is rescued from tragedy, a space where the harmonies of a woman’s courage live. The troubles of a nation’s wars come to bear on a child who grows into a poet who must lift nightmares into her hands and remember. The result is an incredibly beautiful work with a lyricism wrested from the ache in America’s soul where poets repair wounded histories so they can claim their lives and our own.”
—Afaa Michael Weaver
“'Because someone should know / I’ve been here,' Laren McClung writes early in her first book, the debut of an important young talent. Part sardonic, part Garbo-like, she walks the thin line between nothing and something as if she’s been doing it all of her life. Her catalogue of the end and beginning is moving, honest and fiercely focused—far from the usual suspects. These profound poems are destined for the forms they inhabit. Form as absence of form. Form as everlasting.”
—Bruce Weigl