Diana Khoi Nguyen, _Ghost Of_

A DEBUT POETRY volume, and a wrenching one. Nguyen is the oldest of three children;  her brother, the youngest, died by suicide. Some time before that, he "cut out only his face from every photograph in the hall, carefully slipping each frame back into position."

Interspersed throughout the volume are five poems, each titled "Triptych," that juxtapose the scissored family photo with one poem typeset to fit the gap left by the scissored-out brother, and a second poem typeset to match the dimensions of the photo, but with white space for the gap in the surviving image.

Also interspersed are five poems titled "Gyotaku," the name of a traditional Japanese printmaking method, involving the inking of a real fish. In these poems, the gap-shaped poem is turned into--as it were--a rubber stamp, and used to create a graphic design on the facing page.

Arranged around these ten poems are another fifteen more conventional ones, mainly about the family.

Simple enough to describe the organization of the book, but not so easy to describe its effect.

Imagine that Laertes, rather than Ophelia, had become psychologically estranged and taken his own life. Ophelia is left to mourn--which she does not by leaping into graves and threatening violence, but by writing poems--poems that try to trace with a slow finger the infinitely complicated knot of her relationship with her brother, its particular intimacies and silences, a relationship that from beginning to end took place in the deep shadow cast by the traumas their parents lived through.

As I said at the outset, wrenching.