Primordial

Poems

You must sign in to see if this title is available for request. Sign In or Register Now
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Mar 04 2025 | Archive Date Feb 28 2025

Talking about this book? Use #Primordial #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!


Description

Mai Der Vang’s poetry—lyrically insistent and visually compelling—constitutes a groundbreaking investigation into the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants. Primordial is a crucial turn to the ecological and generational impact of violence, a powerful and rousing meditation on climate, origin, and fate.

With profound and attentive care, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam. The saola looks like an antelope, with two long horns, and is related to wild cattle, though the saola has been placed in a genus of its own. Remarkably, the saola has only been known to the outside world since 1992, and sightings are so rare that it has now been more than a decade since the last known image of one was captured in a camera trap photo in 2013.

Primordial examines the saola’s relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival. Can a war-torn landscape and memory provide sanctuary, and what are the consequences for our climate, our origins, our ability to belong to a homeland? Written during a difficult pregnancy and postpartum period, Vang’s poems are urgent stays against extinction.

Mai Der Vang’s poetry—lyrically insistent and visually compelling—constitutes a groundbreaking investigation into the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the...


Advance Praise

“There’s a way to set a line to remind a reader: poetry is incantation’s medium. Mai Der Vang’s Primordial, then, is a deep spell compendium composed of insistent repetition near graven in its gravity. Vang makes smoke out of LIGHT, planets with LANGUAGE, existence against erasure, and names from secrets, which is to say: this is remarkable poetry set to transfix.”—Douglas Kearney 

“There’s a way to set a line to remind a reader: poetry is incantation’s medium. Mai Der Vang’s Primordial, then, is a deep spell compendium composed of insistent repetition near graven in its...


Marketing Plan

National publicity campaign

Bookseller outreach campaign

Social media promotion

Targeted digital advertising

3-city author tour

National publicity campaign

Bookseller outreach campaign

Social media promotion

Targeted digital advertising

3-city author tour


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781644453261
PRICE $18.00 (USD)
PAGES 144

Available on NetGalley

NetGalley Shelf App (PDF)
Send to Kindle (PDF)
Download (PDF)