Zombie Vomit Mad Libs
Zombie Vomit Mad Libs
Duy Đoàn
"Spare, haunting, and wry, Zombie Vomit Mad Libs does not fuck around. These poems exist on the razor-thin edge that divide the states of waking and sleep, of being high and sober, of living and not living: 'the breath / you take as you cross over into sleep.' This is a brilliant mind at work, culling the expanse of human creation—from Shakespeare to Pokémon to the iPhone—to wrestle with deadly serious themes of suicide, imperialism, love, and loss. Tightly crafted gems that flirt, rage, and sing in multiple dictions and registers, Doan's poems will leave you devastated, changed."
—Tamiko Beyer, author of Last Days
November 2024
ISBN: 9781949944686
Available in both print and digital formats.
Duy Đoàn (zwē dwän / zwee dwahn) is the author of We Play a Game (Yale University Press), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Duy’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Margins, Kenyon Review and Poetry. He received an MFA in poetry from Boston University. He is Vietnamese American.
Additional Praise:
“Zombie Vomit Mad Libs by Duy Đoàn (Nov., Alice James) includes all the play, allusion, and potential violence of its title. It brings diacritics to English, suicides to lists, and screenplays to poems with a frantic, perplexed drive. Like the author's debut, narrative arcs are unpredictable across the text: vampiric characters kiss, religious symbols cross conversion therapy. The volume cites movies and other texts with the scattered, interrupted brief thoughts that characterize its zombieness like a new genre of horror on the page."
—Poetry Northwest
"From its very first electric moment, Duy Doan fills these pages with lines that are virtuosic in their intensity, conjured from brain chemicals, earworms, and ghosts. From Wong Kar-wai to Sonic the Hedgehog, this collection pushes at the edges where the forms of the dead meet the language of the living. By turns haunted, conversational, probing, sharp, these poems seek to remix the blank, to complicate the white space of memory with the traces of possible futures. The zombie poems moving through this collection place it in a kind of aftermath, where the life that came before balances on the edge of what comes next. To commune with the dead, to re-enact their music, to listen to that music and take from it new life—this is Duy Doan's magic, and his particular form of punk-rock hope."
—Laura Marris, translator of The Plague
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