Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh
Linh Dinh, reading at the Asian American Literature Festival, Washington, D.C (27 July, 2017)
Born	1963 Saigon
Nationality	US
Genre	poetry
Notable awards	Pew Fellowship

Linh Dinh (Vietnamese Đinh Linh, born 1963, Saigon, Vietnam) is a Vietnamese-American poet, fiction writer, translator, and photographer.^[1]

He was a 1993 Pew Fellow.^[2] He writes a column for The Unz Review.^[3]

Biography[]

Dinh came to the US in 1975, lived in Philadelphia and in 2018 is moving back to Vietnam.^[4][5]

In 2005, he was a David Wong fellow at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England.^[6][7] He spent 2002–2003 in Italy as a guest of the International Parliament of Writers and the town of Certaldo.^[8][9]

He was a visiting faculty member at University of Pennsylvania.^[10] From 2015–2016, Dinh was the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.^[11]

Career[]

He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House^[12] and Blood and Soap, and five books of poems: All Around What Empties Out,^[13] American Tatts, Borderless Bodies, Jam Alerts, and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy. His first novel, Love Like Hate, was published in October 2010 and won the .

His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, The Best American Poetry 2007, and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present. The Village Voice picked his Blood and Soap as one of the best books of 2004.^[14] Translated into Italian by Giovanni Giri, it is published in Italy as Elvis Phong è Morto.

Politics[]

Linh Dinh writes for The Unz Review.

He is a Holocaust denier, writing that “the elaborate Holocaust myth... [is] propped up by a shoahload of bogus scholarship and tear jerking movies,”^[15] and has expressed suspicion that the 2018 shootings at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue were similarly fictitious, saying “The always reliable US media announced that 11 Jews were killed in Pittsburgh, although there’s not a single pixel of visual evidence[...]so the cat must have instantly covered all the corpses with dirt and lapped up every drop of blood.”^[16] He has suggested that Donald Trump is an agent of the deep state and that “to better serve Jews, Trump is willing to appear as their piñata.”^[17]

He believes that "Israel is a violent concept that is executed and maintained with terror, and by this I mean American-sponsored Jewish terror, though these world class terrorists are so relentless with their propaganda, they have made "terrorist" nearly synonymous with their enemy, the Muslim. There is hope for Palestinians, however, for as the USA implodes, Israel will also go up in smoke. Working in tandem, the US and Israel have collapsed several Muslim governments and generated millions of refugees. The same fate awaits Israel, though its dissolution should be permanent, for only then will peace come."^[18]

He has suggested that “in every field besides sports, entertainment and politics, blacks are failing spectacularly against all other races,” writing that “during segregation, blacks [...] were self-sufficient, because they had to be. With integration, blacks can take their money to superior, non-black businesses, and that’s why you see almost no black businesses any more, not even in the blackest neighborhoods.”^[19] “Black hip hop [leads] the decay” of the American mind, he writes, saying “much of this has been accomplished under the stewardship of Jewish impresarios.”

Reviews[]

Publishers Weekly reviews Linh Dinh's American Tatts:

The second effort in verse from this rising star of the small-press world turns his considerable powers to the depiction of acrid ironies, unmitigated disgust and politically charged gall. One of its opening poems imagines the poet as a half-knight, half-corpse "Cadavalier," exclaiming, "This pinkish universe is really nothing/ But a flocculation of my desires." A fast-moving poem called "Pick-Up Lines"—one of many about sexual discomfort—instructs a lover to "listen to my effluvium." Dinh (All Around What Empties Out) often imitates (or perhaps quotes) subliterary material: online personal ads, instant messaging, brochures and corporatespeak ("We've entered a new level of parking consciousness"), confessions of X-rated adventures by semi-literate writers. His swift lines also portray the kind of grotesque caricature ("The day before her abortion,/ The one-eyed lady accidentally swallowed her glass eye") used manipulatively in politics. Exploring disgust while toying with frames and assumptions, the poet becomes in one sense a real heir to Charles Bukowski; in another, he joins other younger poets (such as Drew Gardner and K. Silem Mohammad) in a movement toward hard-edged, provocative parody. It might be hard to call Dinh's volume pleasing, but readers of a certain temperament may well find it irresistible.

He has translated many international poets into Vietnamese, and many Vietnamese poets and fiction writers into English, including Nguyen Quoc Chanh, Tran Vang Sao, Van Cam Hai, and Nguyen Huy Thiep.^{[citation needed]}

Works[]

Poetry[]

• Some Kind of Cheese Orgy, Chax Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-925904-78-2
• Jam Alerts, Chax Press, 2007, ISBN 9780925904683
• Lĩnh Đinh Chích Khoái, (Nhà xuất bản Giấy Vụn, Sài Gòn, 11.2007)
• Borderless Bodies, poetry (Factory School, 2006)
• American Tatts, poetry Chax Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0-925904-55-3
• All Around What Empties Out, Subpress, 2003, ISBN 978-1-930068-19-3
• Drunkard Boxing, Singing Horse Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-935162-18-9

Fiction[]

• Blood and Soap, Stories. Seven Stories Press. 2004. ISBN 978-1-58322-642-1. Translated into Japanese (Hayakawa Publishing, 2008) and Italian (Spartaco, 2006), as Elvis Phong è Morto!.
• Fake House. Seven Stories Press. 2000. ISBN 978-1-58322-039-9.
• Love Like Hate, Seven Stories Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-58322-909-5

Translations[]

• Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, a bilingual edition of Phan Nhiên Hạo's poetry (Tupelo, 2006)^[20]

Editor[]

• Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996)^[21]
• Three Vietnamese Poets, translations (Tinfish, 2001)^[22]
• Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam, anthology, Seven Stories, 1996, ISBN 978-1-888363-02-9

Anthologies[]

• Rajini Srikanth; Esther Yae Iwanaga, eds. (2001). "The Dead". Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing. Rutgers University Press. p. 127. ISBN 0-8135-2966-2. Linh Dinh.
• Heather McHugh; David Lehman, eds. (2007). "Continuous Bullets over Flattened Earth; A Super-Clean Country". The Best American Poetry 2007. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-9973-2.

References[]

External links[]

• AsianAmericanPoetry.Com Poet Profile On Linh Dinh
• "Linh Dinh", PennSound
• "Most Beautiful Words: Linh Dinh’s Poetics of Disgust", Jacket 27, Susan M. Schultz
• "The Personal Becomes Political: The PowerfulL Intensity of Linh Dinh", Marianne Villanueva, Pacific Rim Review of Books
• "Linh Dinh with Matthew Sharpe", The Brooklyn Rail, May 2004
• Robert Malloy (January 11–18, 2001). "He Went Thataway". Philadelphia City Paper. Archived from the original on 2009-01-09.
• Casino Time essay by Dinh on the economic and social distinctions that are circumvented (or not) by the terms "recession" and "depression"
• Postcards from the End of America This is Dinh's own photo blog that was formerly called "State of the Union", but now renamed. Through a combination of essays (both photographic and words), Dinh has been "tracking our deteriorating socialscape".