Salt & Ashes

<p><strong style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Salt and Ashes</strong><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> is a searing poetic reckoning with love loss rage and survival. In this devastatingly intimate collection Thanh Dinh writes through the shattered glass of diaspora queerness and feminine grief-fusing memoir myth and lyrical philosophy into a gospel for the brokenhearted.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Structured like a symphony-</span><strong style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Andante</strong><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> </span><strong style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Romanze</strong><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> </span><strong style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Scherzo</strong><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> and </span><strong style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Finale</strong><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>-each movement carries the reader deeper into a landscape where kindness can kill memory becomes a wound and love is both the altar and the knife. These are not quiet poems. These are the prayers of a girl who never got to be a girl. These are the unsent letters the hallucinations of Ophelia the last cigarette of a ghost who was once loved.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Haunted by historical violence and personal betrayals the speaker refuses closure. Instead she offers clarity through fire-insisting that tenderness can still bloom in ruins and that longing though brutal is still holy.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>For readers of Ocean Vuong Sylvia Plath Trịnh Công Sơn and anyone who's ever tried to rebuild themselves from smoke </span><em style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Salt and Ashes</em><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> is not just a poetry collection. It's a resurrection.</span></p>