NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT WOUNDS/THE TRADITION: American Beauty|American Violence

Season 2, Episode 3 Transcript

T: Happy Wednesday! I’m Tamara Crawford, here with Vina Orden. And this is The Lift Up podcast — inviting you to discover empowering reads by marginalized writers. In this Episode 3, we will discuss two works of poetry, The Tradition by Jericho Brown and Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong.

The Tradition by Jericho Brown, published in 2019, is an amazingly crafted book of poetry that seeks to explore varying facets of “tradition,” such as “the sonnet tradition, the tradition of racial injustice in this country [sic: the US], the tradition of continuing to plant gardens.” He explores these points of tradition using the themes of “Blackness … Queerness, Whiteness, Western mythology, education.” It has been listed as a 2019 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and long-listed in 2019 for the National Book Award for Poetry. It was also nominated in 2019 for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In 2020, it was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, as well as listed as a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, published in 2017, is Vuong’s poignant debut poetry collection that deals with the impact of war and migration over three generations. Described as a “significant voice” by poet and chair of judges of the T.S. Eliot Prize, Bill Herbert, it has won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2017, the Forward Prize for best first collection, as well as the Whiting and Thom Gunn awards.

So, without further ado, let’s get right to it …

T: Hey, Vina. How are you? This month has been absolutely crazy, hasn’t it?

V: Hi, Tamara. Yeah, it’s been such a heavy month —I mean, a heavy year really — with all of this violence against Asians in the US up 150% … And I know there’s been a spike in the UK too. All this, of course, while we’re still fighting for justice for Breonna Taylor and, at least if you follow the news here in the US, just essentially being re-traumatized watching the trial of Derek Chauvin, who was George Floyd’s murderer.

And what keeps coming back to me is something that we’ve been talking a lot about on this show … You know, about what gets left out in history and why. And I am just so grateful for all of the Asian voices that we’re now hearing, and many of them point out that this violence against Asians and kind of the pitting of one minoritized community against the other — these aren’t new things.

The writer and activist Helen Zia talks about how Asian Americans are not “missing in action” but “missing in history.” And I think that there’s a lot of silence in our community about racism, for instance, but I also think that comes from not knowing our own history of activism and solidarity with Black and other communities of color.

So, I also think that’s why it was just timely and very healing, at least for me, to be reading both of these books by poets who wrestle with their own experience of American violence and who refuse to assimilate or be invisibilized by the dominant narrative — what really is the illusion of what America and being American is.

T: I completely agree, and I’m glad that these works have helped you as you’ve had to deal with what’s been going on in the US and struggle through that. It’s definitely been a difficult time for our friends in the Asian American communities. And before we begin, I think we just need to take a moment and ask our friends and our listeners to really take some time to reflect on what’s going on right now, as well as how well we can show up for our friends in the AAPI community right now.

So, if you don’t mind, I just want to redirect everyone to take a read of the two pieces you’ve written and published on Medium titled, “The Depth of our Losses, Recent & Historical” and “#MeToo — A Letter to My Father.” And I just want to ask everyone to take some time to dive into those resources and have the important conversations around race, stereotypes, hypersexualization, and just understand how dangerous the rhetoric is, how dangerous it has become, and how it needs to stop. We all need to challenge ourselves, and our peers, and our society.

And just to bring this back full circle to this episode, the crazy thing is we didn’t even plan to do this episode, from a podcast perspective, based off of what had happened, but here we are with these two timely and relevant collections published in 2016 and 2019, and still so important in 2021 …

V: I know, right? I mean, I almost wish that it weren’t so, but as you say, here we are … And thank you for pointing out to our listeners those blog posts. As we always try to do, we put together a list of resources for places to support and learn from; articles to read that contextualize these recent incidents of anti-Asian violence within a larger history; and we also link to our Bookshop list Situating Asians in America for more nonfiction, fiction, and poetry to check out. So, please do have a look at those …

So, back to our poets … I think readers tend to assume that poetry — especially by writers of color — should be read autobiographically. And in the case of Jericho Brown and Ocean Vuong, they do speak of their poetry as being influenced by personal and collective history, as well as politics.

Brown talks about this in his interview with Krista Tippett of On Being. He says:

… I always understood that in my poems, if I were to be writing about the father, because of the subject matter of my poems, if I say “father,” I’m not just talking about my dad. I’m also talking about that father, God, that I was taught in church. And if I say “father,” that also would have resonance with “fatherland” and “motherland,” thinking about America, thinking about the continent of Africa that is unknown to me in so many ways and yet a part of me, culturally.

We definitely see this in a poem like “Stake,” and I’ll just pick out a few verses to read from that Jericho Brown poem:

I am a they in most of America. / … How / Old will I get to be in a nation / That believes we can grow out / Of a grave? Can reach. Climb / High as the First State Bank. / Take a bullet. Break through / Concrete. The sidewalk. / … People say bad things about / Me, though they don’t know / My name. I have a name. / A stake. I settle. Dig. Die. / Go underground. / … Root. Shoot / Up like a thought someone / Planted. Someone planted / An idea of me. A lie. / … The myth of a wooded / Hamlet in America, a thicket, / Hell, a patch of sunlit grass / Where any one of us bursts into / One someone as whole as we.

And we also get a sense of Vuong’s experience of America in Night Sky with Exit Wounds. He gives us his origin story in just a few lines in the poem “Notebook Fragments.” He says, “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. / Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.”

T: Wow!

V: Yeah … And I love that Tippett also interviewed Vuong. He talked about how he learned about the Vietnam War in school … It kind of starts out funny. How there were these five chapters he remembered having to learn on George Washington — you know, all about his wooden teeth and chopping down a cherry tree — but then just two pages on how something bad happened in Vietnam and that the Americans were heroes.

So in college, he wasn’t prepared to see

hundreds of dead bodies. Asian bodies. Bodies that look like me … Sometimes, the bodies were so mangled, you didn’t know where one began and ended. And so I wanted for my first book to have Vietnamese bodies on the cover that were living.

I love that. And by the way, I can’t let go of that cover of Night Sky with Exit Wounds … It’s of Vuong at age 2, flanked by his mother and aunt. This photo was taken at a refugee camp in the Philippines, and he talked about how they paid a photographer with their daily ration of three cups of rice just for that photo!

T: Wow!

V: Yeah … And it’s also so interesting what he said about his second book — it’s a novel in this case — On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which does revisit some of the themes and scenes from Night Sky. And he says:

a novel is, at its core, one person trying to know themselves so thoroughly that they realize, in the end, it was the times they lived in, the people they touched and learned from, that made them real … I wanted the book to be founded in truth but realized by the imagination. I wanted to begin as a historian and end as an artist.

I just love the way Ocean Vuong speaks, and I’ve been lucky enough to actually see him live at an author panel. And, you know, it’s completely unscripted, but still, he has this way of just being so thoughtful, and deliberate, and naturally poetic when he speaks. I wish I conversed that way, but maybe I need to write more poems or something.

T: That is amazing that you’ve seen Ocean Vuong in person in an author panel! I watched his 2019 interview with Michel Martin on Amanpour & Co., and was struck by what he said, especially in response to her reading that portion of “Notebook Fragments” and his thoughts about writing it. In particular that line — which stuck with me — and where he notes that as a product of war “there is no right or wrong” to explaining how he has come to exist in this world. But he additionally offers a take on how he particularly views things, in which he says “you can be a victim, but whether you live in victimhood is up to you.” And I found that interesting because we see this in his poetry. We see the sense of rawness and pain and what Michel mentioned, anger to a certain extent, but you also see this gentleness, and love, and understanding, amongst some difficult and traumatic experiences and themes.

And I also found with Jericho Brown’s poems that rawness, that pain, that desire for reckoning within his poetry, but also a sense of moving forward, and growing, and continuing to plant and nurture, despite everything that he has experienced, that Black Americans have experienced. And one of my favorite poems of his that illustrates this is “Foreday in the Morning,” and if I pick out a few verses here, it says:

… I thank God for my citizenship in spite / Of the timer set on my life to write / These words: I love my mother. I love black women / Who plant flowers as sheepish as their sons. By the time the blossoms / Unfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who tend them / Are already at work. Blue. I’ll never know who started that lie that we are lazy, / But I’d love to wake that bastard up / At foreday in the morning, toss him in a truck, and drive him under God / Past every bus stop in America to see all those black folk / Waiting to go work for whatever they want. / … My God, we leave things green.

V: Yeah, I really, really loved that poem too! And one of the things that I appreciate about both these poets is how accessible their poems are to people like you and me who, you know, we’re not holed up in some ivory tower, right? It actually reminds me — I don’t know if you caught any of it — but how the former youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman just, I felt, completely stole the show at Biden’s presidential inauguration with her poem “The Hill We Climb.” It was amazing how that poem just went viral among people from all walks of life, not necessarily, you know, someone who loves poetry.

In a Bennington Review interview, Brown shares a bit of his philosophy about writing as well as teaching poetry — so he’s a professor and actually the director of the creative writing program at Emory University. And he says:

… no matter the race of the poet, I’m much more interested in a poem that is like the life we live. I want the poem that is like, “I saw that people got shot at the synagogue today, and I had a sandwich, and I miss my daughter.” And in actuality, that’s what a day in our life looks like, and the poem has to carry the tones of all those emotions.

I just love that … And Vuong also makes an interesting observation about how the “standardized language” we learn in school — this sort of “wrong” or “right” kind of English — is actually arbitrary and exclusive, especially to people of color. He says:

… in fact, language is always changing. And I think it’s the poets, the writers, and even the youth — they’re using language to cast new meaning, in the same way Chaucer just winged English spelling … [because] there was no standardized spelling [then].

Which I thought was interesting! But more than that, what’s exciting is how they challenge that exclusivity and that dominance of a Western/Eurocentric mode of writing and also teaching poetry (Vuong teaches at Amherst as well).

They both have poems called “Trojan,” same exact title, for example. And I’m just amazed at how they make us look at, and this is something you mentioned, this common or traditional trope of lyric poetry like Greek mythology but in fresh and surprising ways. So Brown’s poem “Trojan” is about being in a physical, primarily sexual relationship with someone, and it makes us think about the sort of cultural glorification we have of this kind of aggressive masculinity and of war.

And then you have Vuong’s poem, which is just as intimate but is so different — I mean it’s just this heartbreaking and at the same time defiant portrait of a young trans person who hasn’t come out yet. It’s really such a delicate poem, and I want to read a bit from the beginning of it:

A finger’s worth of dark from daybreak, he steps / into a red dress. A flame caught / in a mirror the width of a coffin. / Steel glinting in the back of his throat …

… Look how he dances. The bruise-blue wallpaper peeling / into hooks as he twirls, his horse / -head shadow thrown on the family / portraits, glass cracking beneath its stain.

T: So beautiful. And I agree … I mean, poetry is so interesting and so different from reading fiction. For me, I actually find it more difficult than fiction, because it’s really subjective how a poem might speak to, or resonate with the reader. And I find that a collection of poetry is something that you can’t just sit down and read like a book. Sometimes, you have to take a few passes at a poem to try and understand it and gather what it means to you. And I also really find it interesting that both poets reevaluate poetic form, like you said, through takes on Greek mythology, or Eurocentric forms.

Slightly going off tangent here, it reminds me of the artwork of Harmonia Rosales, an Afro-Cuban artist who invites viewers to re-imagine or re-evaluate the Western/Eurocentric notion of beauty through her paintings, which take “classic” European artworks and provides a view where they are instead painted as representations of the African diaspora. And similarly in these collections, we’re seeing how both Vuong and Brown provide similar reconstructions and inventions of form, such as Brown’s invention of the duplex, and Vuong’s take on Dante’s Inferno with his poem “Seventh Circle of Earth.”

With the “Seventh Circle of Earth,” this is a poem reflecting on the murder of couple Michael Humphrey and Clayton Capshaw in Texas, in April 2011, by immolation. And it’s printed as a series of arranged numbers suspended across the page, followed by the verses as footnotes. Now, Vuong had started out writing this poem as a “traditional” poem but felt that it did not portray the horror of their murder in the manner he wanted and had abandoned the poem; however, he later went back to it and re-worked it after reading about violence and scholarship. And he talks about this in the article for Poetry School, where he says:

I originally wrote the poem in tercets, echoing Dante’s terza rima format … It was not until three years later, while reading a critical work on violence and scholarship, did I see, more clearly, the footnotes on the bottom of the page. I found myself slipping right to the notes as I progressed, reading them first. They possessed, in that reading, an urgency that began to stitch itself into a fabric of broken utterances fused together by parataxis. It was, in a way, found poetry. That gave me the idea to re-work “Seventh Circle of Earth” into a piece written entirely in the footnote. This time, the vast and utter emptiness one confronts on the page felt more faithful to the violent erasure of the two murdered men. It felt right to begin the poem with its own vanishing … I hope that the form speaks, enacts, also, that for those in the margins who are perennially silenced, the footnote can be a place one gets to tell one’s story. That because the main stage has been obliterated does not mean all hope of speech is lost.

And in re-reading this poem after understanding a bit more about Vuong’s process (as well as researching the events that I admit I hadn’t heard about until I read the poem), the connection here is not lost on me. The emptiness of the page, followed by the poem as footnotes amplifies the sense of horror at the immediate erasure of this couple. And I found it to be a really powerful poem, and all the more so with it being written in this format.

V: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s just what’s so powerful about poetry versus, say, reading or tuning into the news about horrific events. To be honest, I think we become numb to a sort of onslaught of one tragic story after another on the news. And, just like you point out, poetry is a “slower” form. And so, it does force you to sit with something; to think about it; to feel a range of emotions instead of what we normally do after watching the news, you know, just simply “moving on.”

And I love that connection you make to art too. Kehinde Wiley does a similar thing as Rosales. Before he painted Barack Obama’s presidential portrait, he was probably best known for his series reimagining Old Masters paintings that we see at the Met but with Black protagonists in them. They’re just so powerful. And what he did was to invite “everyday” people into his studio, like these beautiful men from the streets of Harlem and LA. There’s actually the fun fact I worked with one reporter at WNYC — and shoutout to Darnell Jefferson if you’re listening right now. I might just have to send you this episode! And he ended up being one of Wiley’s models for this portrait called “St. Dionysus.” Just for a little bit of fun, we’ll link to that story in our blog when our transcript comes out next week.

There’s another artist I love, and that’s the Nigerian American Toyin Ojih Odutola who did this series of really brilliant pastel and charcoal portraits, imagining what the world would have looked like if colonialism and the slave trade never happened. I might be biased, but I really do think that the most exciting art and writing happening right now is actually coming from creative people of color …

And to tie it back to the poems, I think what these artists and what Brown and Vuong are doing is refracting the dominant white gaze while also reflecting on their own identities. The two poems that stand out for me, in terms of these ideas, is Brown’s poem “Dark” and “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong.”

So, this is another tradition in poetry that I think the two men break. You may or may not remember, but there’s that poem we all probably had to read in high school, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” I looked back on it, and it’s actually a really long poem, so I don’t think I’ve ever read through to the end of that poem. But I think people are familiar with the beginning, which is: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

In retrospect, especially after reading poets of color like Brown and Vuong and also being in this moment, I mean, I felt after reading that for the first time in a long time, I was just hit by Whitman’s ego, but then also his privileged perspective in assuming that we all share a common experience, like in the last couple of lines, the last line of that verse — “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

In contrast, even though Brown and Vuong are self-assured in their own way, they’re also full of self-doubt. So when they write a poem of self-affirmation, it’s going to sound very different.

And I actually appreciate how Brown can be so serious but then also poke fun at himself at the same time in a poem like “Dark,” which goes:

I am sick of your sadness, / Jericho Brown, your blackness, // … I’m sick of your good looks, / Your debates, your concern, your / Determination to keep your butt / Plump, the little money you earn. // … I see that / You’re blue. You may be ugly, / But that ain’t new. / Everyone you know is / Just as cracked. Everyone you love is / As dark, or at least as black.

And then there’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” which contrasts fear and hope in lines like:

Don’t be afraid, the gunfire / is only the sound of people / trying to live a little longer & failing … // The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed. & remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.

Also, going back to something you mentioned earlier … I really love this form that Brown invented called the duplex. And right now for National Poetry Month, I’m participating in a #Decolonize30for30 poetry challenge, where I’ve been trying out non-Western poetic forms, particularly something called the dalit — which is an indigenous form of Pilipino poetry that was actually re-appropriated by Spanish friars to convert us natives to Catholicism. And now, you know, I might just have to try and write a duplex, I guess!

So, the duplex is actually a mashup of other poetic forms, most noticeably the guh-zhal, an Arabic form, and the Malay form pantoum, where certain words or phrases are repeated at the beginning or end of each verse. The Tradition is broken up into 3 parts, and each of them starts with a duplex poem.

I love the second duplex which starts: “A poem is a gesture toward home. / It makes dark demands I call my own. // Memory makes demands darker than my own …”

And then it ends: “No sound beating ends where it began. / None of the beaten end up how we began. // A poem is a gesture toward home.”

T: Wow. Wow. Those are such beautiful poems — the duplex is so interesting. And, you know, I’ve been following your dalit form poems on Instagram and I’ve enjoyed them, and so I can’t wait to read your next poem in the duplex form!

V: Yeah, we’ll see if I make that public.

T: I’ll be looking forward to it! So, before we move on, I just want to go back and correct myself, because I realize that I’ve mis-titled Ocean Vuong’s poem. I think I’ve had Dante’s Inferno stuck in my head this whole time and kept calling it the “Seventh Circle of Hell,” but the poem is actually called, “Seventh Circle of Earth.” I just want to make sure that’s clear for everybody, and we’ll make sure that’s also clear in the transcript as well — we’ll make that correction there.

So, you know, these two poems that you mentioned are such great poems. They speak to the respective identities of each poet. And when I think of reflections of self and identity, I also think about Brown’s “Riddle” and how this poem, for me, questions what is one’s actual identity, not only in the frame of being a Black person but in the frame of our existence on this planet, in the world. It really stood out for me, and I also want to read a few verses from this poem as well, because I think it’s so amazing just the way he’s written it. It goes:

We do not recognize the body / Of Emmett Till. We do not know / The boy’s name nor the sound / Of his mother wailing. We have / Never heard a mother wailing. / We do not know the history / Of this nation in ourselves. We / Do not know the history of our- / Selves on this planet because / We do not have to know what / We believe we own. We believe / We own your bodies but have no / Use for your tears. We destroy / The body that refuses use. We use / Maps we did not draw. We see / A sea so cross it. We see a moon / So land there. We love land so / Long as we can take it …

And then further on, he says, “Wait. Wait. What are we? What? What on Earth are we? What?”

And I love how this poem for me questions identity; questions history — of the US, of the world — the history of people who have been stolen so that it’s difficult to trace your own history; questions the rationale of the things we use today by mentioning maps (if you kind of flow that through from maps, to geography, to the layout of the world as we know it now), how we’ve come to use it (land taken just because it was desired), the violence in which it has all been procured exemplified by the sound of a mother’s wailing. And then he ends it with the question, What actually are we? And this is the riddle — What are we? For me it’s almost as if he is asking, can we really call ourselves human if this is the kind of damage you’re willing to inflict? The erasure of another human’s identity that they’re forever suspended in this reconciling of that identity. I just feel that within this poem, there is so much to unpack here. I just thought it was so brilliant.

V: I know, I know! And really, going back to the theme of this episode, American Beauty | American Violence, I’m reminded of something that the great James Baldwin said. He said that “Love has never been a popular movement. The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.” And it’s just striking how two very different poets from very different backgrounds end up having this kind of shared American experience of violence but also, as you mentioned, of beauty and love. And really, when you think about it, that’s how we defy expectations and survive as minoritized people.

So, there are two very powerful poems (among the many powerful poems in both collections) that illustrate this for me, in addition to “Riddle,” which you just read from, and that’s Brown’s “Bullet Points” and Vuong’s “Headfirst.”

I know I feel like we’ve been reading a lot, and I hope this still falls in the bounds of “fair use,” but I do just want to give listeners a taste of these poems — and we hope you all go out and buy the books after being so sated by our readings today!

So, here’s a bit from Brown’s “Bullet Points”:

I will not shoot myself / In the head, and I will not shoot myself / In the back, and I will not hang myself / With a trashbag, and if I do, I promise you, I will not do it / In a police car while handcuffed // … When I kill me, I will / Do it the same way most Americans do, / I promise you: cigarette smoke / Or a piece of meat on which I choke / Or so broke I freeze / In one of these winters we keep / Calling worst.

And then there’s Vuong’s “Headfirst,” which is written from the perspective of the mother:

When they ask you / where you’re from, // tell them your name / was fleshed from the toothless mouth / of a war-woman. // That you were not born / but crawled, headfirst — / into the hunger of dogs. My son, tell them / the body is a blade that sharpens // by cutting.

V: Ah, I can’t even!

T: I know, I know, I know! That last line in “Headfirst” — how powerful is that line? That really sat with me … “fleshed from the toothless mouth of a war-woman … but crawled headfirst — into the hunger of dogs.” What it says to me is that you were born to be defiant, to survive, to be strong against all that the world has thrown and will throw at you. Such a powerful piece! And when you go back to “Bullet Points,” again, that highlighted for me the fact that in America, every day is about how to survive the American experience —from Jericho Brown’s perspective, as a Black man, a black person in America. And obviously with everything that’s been going on, it’s so relatable to so many communities. And again, those two poems are just so amazing in representing the themes of defiance and survival. I also found two other poems that I felt kind of represented these themes, Brown’s “After Avery R. Young” and Vuong’s “Torso of Air.” I thought those two poems also resonated with those themes.

But, what I additionally found interesting about both collections is that after sharing some pretty raw and deep poems that highlight the impact of war and inequality, identity and survival, both move towards themes of love as they start to go towards the end of their collections. For me, the two poems that stuck out on those themes were Vuong’s “Devotion” and Brown’s “Stay.” And there’s a part within “Devotion” that grabbed me, where Vuong writes:

& so what — if my feathers / are burning. I / never asked for flight. / Only to feel / this fully, this / entire, the way snow / touches bare skin — & is, / suddenly, snow / no longer.

When I read that, I felt that deepness of devotion, how it makes you want to stay in one place, no longer searching; that warmth has helped to melt the coldness of snow in January, which for me is a dark and isolating time of year. It was just so beautiful. And then when I think of “Stay,” which is a short poem — and since we’ve been giving away a lot here, I’m not going to read it, but I encourage you all, like Vina said, go grab those collections and read them — but with “Stay,” in just 5 lines, you felt the longing of a lover who is entrenched in the memory of another when they’re no longer there. And it really was so touching. Both of these poems are so touching.

V: Yeah, and I do love that Voung ends his collection with that poem “Devotion.” And if you look in the back of the book, he actually dedicates it to his partner of over 10 years. In one of the interviews I found, he talks about how he met his partner Peter after what he admits was a string of mostly dysfunctional relationships with violent and self-destructive men, and some of his poems kind of reflect that part of his life. But then, just reading about how his partner Peter quit his own job to help Vuong with all the travel and presentations he has to do as a professor and published writer … I mean, that’s love! It’s just so heartwarming and hopeful that both of these men have found a way, through all the challenges that we’ve been talking about, to live, to write, and also to encourage young writers — especially writers of color — to find their own voices and their own stories.

Anyway, as usual, we could keep going on, and on, and on here, since there’s just so much in these two books. And, as you say, poetry is something you can just keep going back to and discovering meanings, as you do. But why should we have all the fun here? Listeners, just go out and buy these books already — and actually, you can support this podcast by buying them from bookshop.org/shop/theliftuppod, or since these have been very difficult times for a lot of folks financially, you can also borrow them from your local library (and if they’re not there, lobby your library to put these poetry books on the shelf)!

T: Exactly. Totally agree here — with bookshop.org, again, this is totally not an ad. From our perspective, we just love the model, we love what they do, we love how they support local bookshops. So if you want to support your local bookshop through the link, please do. And like Vina said, if that’s not possible for you, try your local library, support your local library — we need them more than ever!

And to close out, we do want to give you a heads-up on what we’re reading in May. We are reading two books for May — two books again, guys, try to keep up with us …

V: What are we doing to ourselves, Tamara?

T: You know, there are just so many amazing authors, right? Seriously, if you guys could see the massive lists we have at the beginning of the year of what we want to read and just the amount of time we try to narrow these lists down, it’s crazy … I wish we could get to every single book that comes across our way. But, we’re trying, guys!

So, we’ve got two books this time. Again we’re going to be highlighting Asian American Pacific Islander authors, starting with Potiki by Patricia Grace and The Son of Good Fortune by Lysley Tenorio. Feel free to send us questions or suggestions through our Instagram page, again @theliftuppod, and thank you so much for listening to us here at The Lift Up Podcast.

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