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2025 National Book Award Finalist Ms. Magazine’s Best Poetry of 2024 and 2025 The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debut
Split,
Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film
Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker’s disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness.
About the author
Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of
Split, winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies,
An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History, and
Becoming Ghost. Her writing has been published in
The New Republic,
The Nation,
and McSweeney’s and she has received awards from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She currently lives in New York City.
