New poetry: Pursue, by Nhan Trinh

Nhan Trinh, an old friend of mine from our days back at Wichita North high school (he later went on to study at Cornell), has just published a book of poetry on Sandra McPherson‘s Swan Scythe Press. Entitled Pursue, Nhan’s book is decribed by poet Rigoberto Gonz

Posted by Rolf Potts | Comments (1)  | April 5, 2004
Category: Travel Writing


One Response to “New poetry: Pursue, by Nhan Trinh”

  1. Lila T. Says:
    May 27th, 2005 at 9:13 am

    I’m a freshman at International University (IU) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Nhan Trinh (or we often call him Alex) taught me English in my first semester, and I have accidentally known about his first poetry collection, Pursue.

    I cannot find that book here, so I went to the Swan Scythe Press’s website to look for some information about his book. It brought me some feelings when I read “Generation VK”, which is an excerpt from Pursue.

    Along with his family, he went to the US when he was just about four or five, so you know, most of his life was spent in the US. I guess I should read the whole poetry collection to understand more about how he thinks of being an Vietnamese American.

    According to the poem “Generation VK”, I felt that he has been wondering much about his homeland, about the land on which he has grown up, about the differences between the two places and about how different it is when he’s in the US and when he’s in Vietnam (Have I made you confused??)

    He hasn’t taught us much about poetry and literature, but several “literature” periods made me feel more interested in poetry. You should now that I’m 100% Vietnamese, that English is a foreign language to me and that I’m a Business student, so making me cling to Literature in general and Poetry in specific is a great thing.

    My English is not enough to describe my thoughts and feelings to his poems, and the main reason is I haven’t seen the whole collection yet, I guess it takes time for me before I can read the first book of Nhan Trinh. And FYI, he’s working on the next poetry collection. That’s one reason why he’s in Vietnam. I hope we all can have chance to read it soon to see how his literature philosophy has changed since Pursue. It will be more surprising and more appealing after the time he has been staying in his mother country, won’t it?

    See you soon,

    Lila T.