Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the US in 1975, and has also lived in Italy and England. He is the author of two collections of stories and four books of poems. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, Best American Poetry 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places. Linh Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001) , and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2006) . Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. His poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese and Arabic, and he has been invited to read his works all over the US, London, Cambridge and Berlin. He has also published widely in Vietnamese. He lives in Philadelphia.
He has a muscular torso
With a thousand erections
Lighting up the night sky
But none sticks up more
...
Death will come with your eyes—
this death that accompanies us
from morning till night, sleepless,
deaf, like an old regret
...
A blind and deaf bullet buried in the field
Dozing through decades of blood and bones
Then one morning
In a bustling future
...
I’ll give you a roll of barbwire
A vine for this modern epoch
Climbing all over our souls
That’s our love, take it, don’t ask
...