Why is the Edge Always Windy, Mong-Lan

Mong-Lan's second book of poems, Why Is The Edge Always Windy?, is a stunning book of revelations, nightmares, and love poems, cross-cultural and historically compelling. Imagistic, surreal and penetrating, her writing cuts to the quick. Whether writing of Vietnam or 9/11, Mong-Lan's language is inventive and muscular, at times philosophical and elegiac. Grounded in the rhythms of the heart and the world, the poems are lyrically intense with an edgy intelligence.

""'what youve lived through you are,' says Mong-Lan in 'Coast,' one of the early poems in this beautiful, spellbinding book, Why is the Edge Always Windy? One should not be mislead by the title into thinking Mong-Lans work will be airy. The lyricism of her writing sings not of the ethereal but of a hard land; her work speaks not of arrested moments but of the tectonic force of history, which, moving at the pace of geological time, presses cultures against each other, folds moments over each other, edges everywhere and always exposed. Indeed, Mong-Lans are poems of exposure. Reading them is revelatory.""--Lyn Hejinian

""Mong-Lan's Why Is The Edge Always Windy? is a stunning book that turns our 'era of exile' into one of lyric possession, the impulses to lament and to praise whirling together into a bittersweet music. I'm amazed at how these poems hold the complexity and contradiction of a global world view that spans from Hanoi to New York, from Chiapas to San Francisco, while still striking notes of intimacy and making formally beautiful sense. ""--Alison Hawthorne Deming

""Mông-Lan is a remarkably accomplished poet. Always her poems are deft, extremely graceful in the way words move, and in the cadence that carries them. One is moved by the articulate character of things seen, the subtle shifting of images, and the quiet intensity of their information. Clearly she is a master of the art.""--Robert Creeley

Recognizing its importance, the NEA has provided Tupelo Press with a grant to publish this vital second book by Vietnamese-American poet Mong-Lan, who immigrated to the US after the war.