Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
AC Mong: Nightmares

AC Mong: Nightmares

Hung, Hoang

Paperback

Fiction Anthologies

ISBN10: 1724825194
ISBN13: 9781724825193
Publisher: Createspace
Published: Aug 22 2018
Pages: 172
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.40 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: Vietnamese
As a poet, journalist, and translator, Hoang Hung has long been an influential voice for freedom of expression. What a gift it is to hear him in Nightmares, the first full-length English translation of his prison poems. So intimate and immediate is that voice, that when Hung goes through the tar-blackened iron door, we go with him. Hung's descriptions of his surroundings are unsparing. Here is hell itself, he writes. Sleep is blood-colored, the sky, black and blue. We feel the cold of his cell, the longing for freedom and family. The power in these poems lies in their complexity. Bitterness, anger and despair run through them, yet the poet remains attentive to the slenderest symbols of hope. The pinkish white, almost transparent lizards make love beside a prison lamp that radiates with the warmth of spring. In The Young Girl Who Just Arrived, the poet affirms his compassion when he hears a fellow prisoner singing in Chinese. My home is far away Your home is even farther Our homeward road to which we are both blind Well then, let us sing together. This collection is aptly named, full of nightmares that continue even after the prisoner is released. There are days when someone stares at him There are nights when fluttering voices question him. A pat on the shoulder startles him. Yet Nightmares is also an act of witness. Hung exposes, through his own story, the suffering of countless others under repressive regimes. His is the voice of dissident writers everywhere - honest, brave, and indispensable. - Ellen Bass American poet and co-author of The Courage to Heal, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets

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