Duy Doan

In Zombie Vomit Mad Libs, the climate has changed, and what mostly remains are zombies meandering through a world where we only have brief memories--where connection (human and zombie) is now only made possible thanks to bits of the salvaged wreckage that was left behind in the apocalypse. The poems pay homage to horror movies, riff on childhood mad libs, and scatter Vietnamese diacritics over text about iPhones, neurotransmitters, phobias, substance abuse, fleas, and vomit. The stakes are high: these pages are preoccupied with suicide from the start, especially with the deaths and legacies of poet Anne Sexton and Hong Kong actor/singer Leslie Cheung, but they also find ways to smile and serve from fixed narratives, which is where the zombies come to the forefront, wandering through a world where our only shared experiences are fading memories of the final times we encountered chance momentousness in our lifetimes. Macabre humor is combined with formal inventiveness. Drawing from broad swaths of history, literature, and pop culture, the forms in this book and the rewriting of conventional zombie narratives enable the poems to avoid the presumptuousness of wisdom. The poems instead expend their energy through playfulness, unassuming declarative statements, and sparse questions. Folks who love horror movies, especially the little theaters of love and friendship in these films, might appreciate the candor and arrangement of data in lieu of insight and wisdom.

The 112th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores the Vietnamese-American experience Duy Doan’s striking debut reveals the wide resonance of the collection’s unassuming title, in poems that explore—now with abundant humor, now with a deeply felt reserve—the ambiguities and tensions that mark our effort to know our histories, our loved ones, and ourselves. These are poems that draw from Doan’s experience as a Vietnamese-American while at the same time making a case for—and masterfully playing with—the fluidity of identity, history, and language. Nothing is alien to these poems: the Saigon of a mother’s dirge, the footballer Zinedine Zidane, an owl that “talks to his other self in the well”—all have a place in Doan’s far-reaching and intimately human art.