Jason Labbe writes in the Brooklyn Rail,

4/4/18:



I am grateful for A Mere Rica (Chax, 2017), the recent collection by Vietnamese-American poet Linh Dinh, who chooses to live street-level, writing among the working class people I once thought I wanted to transcend. The last part of the book is an interview in which Dinh says, “Instead of schmoozing and networking with other writers, I’ve been getting drunk with plumbers, roofers, cashiers, jailbirds, and cops.” He adds, “If given a chance to spend an afternoon with a National Book Award winner or manicurist, I’d choose the latter.” He sees himself outside of the Poet Class, and his poems present a nation that is not on the brink of apocalypse, but already in the middle of one. The work is bald and easy to understand; it wastes no time with ambiguity or wordplay in its politics and social criticism. Dinh even goes so far as to take down football, an absurd expression of American barbarism devoted purely to gaining territory. In this work I am finding a fresh sense of permission to go there in my own writing, to put aside fears of didacticism, to be sad and angry about everything, to engage a more intimate and direct poetics of protest and outrage. To stand closer to all that is busted and ugly. To be a poet and working class, not one or the other.





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