Becoming Ghost
Poetry
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
2025 National Book Award Finalist
2026 APALA Literature Awards - Asian American Poetry Winner
Ms. Magazine’s Best Poetry of 2024 and 2025
Electric Literature’s Best Poetry Collections, 2025
NPR’s Books We Love 2025
2026 ALA RUSA Notable Poetry List
The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debut Split, Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker’s disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With its incisive glimpses into her Vietnamese identity, Cathy Linh Che’s second poetry collection is vital proof of how pointed and powerful the art form can be. Slicing straight into the excruciating reality of the Vietnam War, she explores how the devastation ultimately affected everything from her own family dynamics to the world’s perception of Vietnamese people. In one cutting section, she draws on her parents’ appearance as doomed extras in the film Apocalypse Now, brilliantly interweaving this surreal memory with the concept of a zombie film. After all, to viewers of the blockbuster, her parents were just faceless figures in the background of their own world, their own story; figures who, according to the film’s seemingly definitive portrait of Vietnam, were dead. Che’s poetry hits like a quiet, unassuming sledgehammer, marked by an unadorned sincerity that makes every line land with brutally clever and heartbreaking clarity.
