In She, Self-Winding, Vietnamese American translator, poet, and all-around Renaissance woman Luu Dieu Van creates sacredness from the profane, builds out memories of war from sex toys, forges identities through maxi-pads. It is earthy poetry, and also almost impossibly deep, each line (and sometimes each word!) running to multiple different interpretations.
Dieu Van celebrates femininity through She, Self-Winding, from unabashedly sexual women and girls enjoying their bodies to women doing what they must to survive. The (im)migrant experience runs like a thread throughout as well. More than once, a poem will bind together women’s shared experiences with the brutality of coloniality and the pleasures of the flesh. She tells us in the second poem of the collection that this is where we’re headed, of course: “they were all trying to prepare her for a long-distance self migration,” Dieu Van writes, closing off “Long Distance Migration” with a openness that reminds the reader that nothing—from migrating to being—is ever really done, as long as one is alive.
In “body or soul,” Dieu Van’s take on Christ reminds me more than a little of the warmth of Cassandra Bruner’s sex worker god in The Wishbone Dress:
“when you are back in bed, god confesses he has dreamed of a bride surrounded by / 200 virgins, though he gave his life for our souls he is neither an eternitarian nor a / practitioner of celibacy, he is just a really nice guy with a big heart, and that better / is meant to be a status of the soul and not body.”
I guess I should acknowledge, here, that maybe the guy in “body or soul” is more God than Christ, but that whole bit about being “a really nice guy / with a big heart” makes me think more of Christ. Throughout “body and soul,” as she does in so many of the poems of She, Self-Winding, Dieu Van plays with gendered expectations and with sex and sexuality, creating that sacredness out of what might be otherwise considered profane. And, at least to me, it’s beautiful.
There are parts of She, Self-Winding that are so funny I laughed; there are poems so sneakily bleak I almost cried, and poems so exquisite—like the titular “she, self-winding”—that I immediately read them all over again. This is an exquisite, sly, brilliant collection, each line carrying multiple meanings: a book that begs to be read again and again.
Essentially a Nerd 