Texas Tech University Press is proud to announce the release of a new book, Nothing Follows, by Lan P. Duong! Part of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) Series, this poetry collection focuses on a young girl and her family’s efforts to beseech those in power to grant “family reunification” visas for the ones they had to leave behind in 1975 after the fall of Saigon.
Lan P. Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Temple University Press, 2012). Duong’s creative works have appeared in Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, Bold Words: Asian American Writing to Span the Centuries, Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, and Crab Orchard Review.
Nothing Follows draws from the genres of memoir and poetry. Written from a young girl’s perspective, the center of this world is a military father, an absent mother, sisters who come and go, broken brothers, and friends she meets in San José. In marking the journey, Lan Duong recreates the portraits of the girl’s friends and family and maps out refugee girlhoods. Spiked with violence, pleasure, and longing, these refuges are questionable sanctuaries for those refugee girls who have grown up during the 1980s in the aftermath of war.
Interested? Check out the exclusive excerpt from Nothing Follows below. TTUP is grateful for the opportunity to publish this gripping debut!