Diana Khoi Nguyen is a poet and multimedia artist whose work has appeared widely in literary journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, PEN America, and The Iowa Review, among others. A winner of the 92Y's Discovery / Boston Review 2017 Poetry Contest, she is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver.

Books by Diana Khoi Nguyen:

Other poems on the web by Diana Khoi Nguyen:
"A Necessary Death in Broad Daylight"
"Buzkashi"
"Getting the Hero to Speak"
"I Keep Getting Things Wrong"
"As from the Corpse, No Door"
Two poems
Two poems
"Work"
Two poems
Three poems
"Selkie Weaning Young"

Diana Khoi Nguyen's Website.

Diana Khoi Nguyen on Twitter.

About Ghost Of:

"Ghost of is truly a brilliant book. Amazing poetry happens inside visual innovations where 'There is nothing that is not music, the pouring of water from one receptacle into another a coat of bees draped over the sack of sugar caving in on itself.' Poetry is found in the gaps, silences and ruptures of history. In 'An Empty House Is a Debt' the poet writes: 'There is a house in me. It is empty. I empty it. / Negative space: the only native emptiness there is.' These poems mean to make a song of emptiness and the spaces we house. They sing to and for the ghosts of identity, exile, and history. They sing like a ghost who looks from the window or waits by the door. Lyric fills in the holes in the story. Ghost Of is unforgettable."
—Terrance Hayes

"Dina Khoi Nguyen's Ghost Of is nothing short of an extraordinary debut. At its center is the haunting disappearance of a brother, gone by suicide. These poems are uncanny renderings of an invisibility made visible by the sheer will of candor, bemused forms, agility of lexicon, and a voice, almost noiselessly extravagant. What she gives us, she takes away; nearly impossible transformations transform. 'Something keeps not happening' she writes. And then she causes it to happen in a language of grief—bold and often colder than most daring, exquisite acts. Nothing here is ever entirely complete—ghost of mourning, ghost of yearning, ghost of the kiln unfilled with the probable impossibility of an afterlife. It is as if a medieval scholar were transcribing an ancient Latin manuscript, pieces of script are missing, illegible, annulled by time. The scholar writes in the margins Desunt Non Nulla—signifying—Not No Things Are Missing, Nguyen's voice is both wraithlike and astonishingly frontal; this is one of the most gifted first books I've read."
—Lucie Brock-Broido

"Across these pages, sound makes shapes that, in turn, shape sounds, creating a complex weave in which absence figures as vividly as presence, and in which the absent are, in fact, present—in the faces so neatly cut out of the photographs . . . a haunting tribute to those we always carry with us, Nguyen's stunning first collection explores the layered losses of displacement, migration, and death in ways that take full responsibility for the particularity of each individual's experience. Written with equal parts frankness and compassion, the book radiates a very human generosity throughout."
—Cole Swensen

"Diana Nguyen's 'Ghost Of' is an astonishing scrapbook of lyric poems and photos where the central muse—her brother—is violently cut out. Poems are shaped into his silhouette as if Nguyen is trying to anatomize his tragic absence with pained and urgent remembrance. Nguyen writes with haunted precision and wondrous innovation. 'Ghost Of' breaks my heart."
—Cathy Park Hong