Thu Mien Tran

Journey of a Soul in Exile Thu Mien Tran

Ten Translated Vietnamese Poems travels through bittersweet images and emotions mired in the past before, during, and after the Vietnam War. It explores the deep sufferings of both the individual speaker and the speaker's Vietnamese compatriots young and old, male and female. Yet the past through which the exiled soul journeys is not simply a source of melancholy, pain, and loneliness. It also supplies ethereal wisps of comfort and hope in nostalgic memories that act like shadows slipping away and hiding secrets from both the reader and the poems' speaker before they can ever be seized and completely understood.