“Balaban’s emotional range is impressively wide and deeply human—by turns compassionate and angry, somber and humorous, earnest and ironic. His voice is strong; his poems are important.”—Harvard Revie
For in that realm of scorpion and snake his soul cried out and the woman came fashioned from light and veiled in rain. He followed a god through desert wastes. From "Peyote Villanelle". Annotatio
I volunteered to go to Vietnam, but as a conscientious objector to war. . . . While most of these events took place in the midst of the war, this is not exactly a story about the war, but a story of r
During the Vietnam war, John Balaban traveled the Vietnamese countryside alone, taping, transcribing, and translating oral folk poems known as "ca dao." No one had ever done this before, and it was Ba
H? Xu?n Huong—whose name translates as "Spring Essence"—is one of the most important and popular poets in Vietnam. A concubine, she became renowned for her poetic skills, writing subtly risqu? poems w
Hanoi. The mysterious mountain jungles. The demimondes of the Hue court and the Saigon cafes. A rural commune. A raucous tailor shop. Just as they traverse wide landscapes, these seventeen stories by
This collection of twelve short stories and one essay by Vietnamese writers reveals the tragic legacy of Agent Orange and raises troubling moral questions about the physical, spiritual, and environmen
Between 1962 and 1971, the U.S. military sprayed approximately twenty million gallons of Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants on Vietnam and Laos, exposing combatants and civilians from both si
