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Sunday, November 18, 2012

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Bridge-cleaner's-stuff--Near-30th-Street-Station








By train station, a 52-year-old black man can often be found, cleaning a bridge, section by section, for free. It's his service to society, he said. He wouldn't let me take a photo of him, since "My appearance is not important. It's not about me. It's about God." He was reluctant to even tell me his age, since "Even a hundred years on this earth is nothing." He was remarkably cheerful. He quoted Isiah 53, "For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not."



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Posted by Linh Dinh at 2:00 PM
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About Me

I was born in Vietnam in 1963, came to the U.S. in 1975, and have also lived in Italy and England. I'm the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004), five books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (2003), American Tatts (2005), Borderless Bodies (2006), Jam Alerts (2007) and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy (2009), and a novel, Love Like Hate (2010). My work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, 2004, 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among many other places. I'm also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (2006). Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. My poems, stories and political writing have been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Icelandic and Finnish, and I've been invited to read my works in London, Cambridge, Brighton, Paris, Berlin, Reykjavik, Toronto and all over the U.S. I've also published widely in Vietnamese.