To further support Action Books’ growing community of writers and readers, we’ve decided to launch a new initiative on the Action Books Blog. Selected by our editorial staff, a recurring series called Action Fokus will highlight excerpts from 12+ radical manuscripts submitted by poets and translators during our 2022 Open Reading Period. Today we are featuring excerpts from Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s Nightghts.

 

“Scenes from a Village” (Vietnamese: “Phân Cảnh Xóm Làng”) is a poem, bearing smaller poems, from Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s collection-in-progress, tentatively titled Nightghts, a constellation of poems born in translation and the light of the dark. 

-Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng

 

 

Scenes from a Village

after Divya Victor’s “CURB 2”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a poet-translator born in Vietnam. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Margins, Columbia Journal and other venues. She studied at Stanford University. Nguyễn-Hoàng’s latest publications include Masked Force (Sàn Art, 2022), a bilingual pamphlet on the war photographs of Võ An Khánh, and Chronicles of a Village (Penguin, 2022), her English translation of a novel by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện.