Winner of the Poetry of the Year Award from the Hanoi Writers Association
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is among the most exciting writers to emerge from post-war Vietnam. The Secret of Hoa Sen shines with craft, art, and deeply felt humanity. These penetrating poems, published in bilingual English and Vietnamese, build new bridges between two cultures bound together by war and destruction.
“Born in 1973 in Vietnam’s north but raised in the south’s lush delta, award-winning poet Nguyễn writes precise, vibrant poems that give voice to her country’s present, grounded in tradition and dark history.” —Library Journal
“Nguyễn writes eloquently about family, femaleness and the sensual beauty of her country. When she writes of place, I feel that I am walking past the rice shoots in a long ago world.” —Omaha World-Herald
“Nguyễn's poetic attention is diverse and wide in scope, but never far from her country and family... one cannot help but feel that each poem is written into the Vietnamese landscape of the poet’s imagination. Not carved, but delicately inscribed; so as to preserve the beauty of a country whose wounds must not define it.” —Poetry International
“My Mother’s Rice
Through the eyes of my childhood I watch my mother,
who labored in a kitchen built from straw and mud.
She lifted a pair of chopsticks and twirled sunlight into a pot of boiling rice,
the perfume of a new harvest
soaked her worn shirt as she bent and fed rice straws to the hungry flames.
I wanted to come and help, but the child in me
pulled myself into a dark corner
where I could watch my mother’s face
teach beauty how to glow in hardship,
and how to sing the rice to cook with her sunbaked hands.
That day in our kitchen
I saw how perfection was arranged
by soot-blackened pans and pots,
and by the bend back of my mother, so thin
she would disappear if I wept, or cried out.”