We Play a Game

Duy Doan's striking debut reveals the wide resonance of the collection's unassuming title, in poems that explore-now with abundant humor, now with a deeply felt reserve-the ambiguities and tensions that mark our effort to know our histories, our loved ones, and ourselves. These are poems that draw from Doan's experience as a Vietnamese-American while at the same time making a case for-and masterfully playing with-the fluidity of identity, history, and language. Nothing is alien to these poems: the Saigon of a mother's dirge, the footballer Zinedine Zidane, an owl that "talks to his other self in the well"-all have a place in Doan's far-reaching and intimately human art.