Winter Phoenix

A book of testimonies in verse, Winter Phoenix is a collection of poems written loosely after the form of an international war crimes tribunal. The poet, a daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, navigates the epigenetics of trauma passed down, and across, the archives of war, dislocation, and witness, as she repeatedly asks, "e;Why did you just stand there and say nothing?"e; Here, the space of accusation becomes both lyric and machine, an "e;investigation"e; which takes place in the margins of martial law, the source material being soldiers' testimonies given during three internationally publicized events, in this order-The Incident on Hill 192 (1966, Phu My District, Vietnam); The Winter Soldier Investigation (1971, Detroit, USA); and The Russell Tribunal (1966, Stockholm, Sweden; 1967, Roskilde, Denmark). Ultimately, however, Winter Phoenix is a document of resilience. Language decays. A ceremony eclipses its trial, and the radical possibilities of a single scream rises from annihilation.