Primordial

Poems

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Pub Date Mar 04 2025 | Archive Date Feb 28 2025

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Description

Pulitzer Prize finalist Mai Der Vang’s “lyrical interventions strike powerful notes of lamentation and rage” (The New Yorker)

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.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Mai Der Vang’s “lyrical interventions strike powerful notes of lamentation and rage” (The New Yorker)

Mai Der Vang’s poetry—lyrically insistent and visually...


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 Paperback
ISBN 9781644453261
PRICE $18.00 (USD)
PAGES 144

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