Watermark

Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose

Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose

Edited by Barbara Tran, Monique T.D. Truong and Luu Truong Khoi, Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose heralds a new era for Vietnamese American literature. Here, for the first time, the most innovative contemporary Vietnamese American writers explore thematic and stylistic territory previously overlooked in other collections, which have traditionally focused on the all-too-expected theme of war. With works by such writers as Linh Dinh, Andrew Lam, Bich Minh Nguyen and Dao Strom. Second printing.

Buy The Book

Asian American Writers Workshop

Press & Praise

PEN Open Book Committee’s Beyond Margins Honoree, 1999

A. Magazine’s Best Anthology of 1998

Watermark is simply some of the best writing from a new generation of Vietnamese writers in America. Eloquent, poignant, funny–the writing goes beyond war–taking us into the towns and fields of America. This is the Vietnamese literature of the future…made inclusive by the editors’ uncommon and judicious selections.

—Russell Leong, UCLA Amerasia Journal

A fascinating and surprising collection by a new generation of Vietnamese American writers, delving into identity and displacement with energy and grace.

—Don Lee, Ploughshares

…presents a new face of Vietnamese America, not only to the American audience in general, but to Vietnamese Americans themselves.

—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Journal of Asian American Studies

…eclectic and unsentimental work written from displacement and from the embracing of a complex national identity.

—Publishers Weekly

The selections fill a gap in Asian American literature as they present a vision both gripping and arresting.

—Library Journal

Watermark is a welcome collection of diverse Vietnamese American voices that speak eloquently across oceans and continents from Hanoi to Paris, from San Francisco to Saigon. . . Forged in the crucible of a painful diaspora, these literary landscapes are haunted by the Vietnam War, imparting to the collection complex and often exhilarating dimensions.

—Books Noted: Fall 1998, The Academy of American Poets