Two Rivers:
New Vietnamese Writing
from America and Viet Nam

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest Editors Kevin Bowen and Ngyuen Ba Chung.

Two Rivers features new fiction, poetry, and essays from Vietnamese and Vietnamese American writers guest-edited by Kevin Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung. One generation after the end of the Vietnamese-American War, the United States is home to over a million Vietnamese. Their contribution to America’s vitality has never been greater, and their views about the war, their resettlement, and the future never more diverse. A period of reexamination, reflection, and new dialogue has begun on both sides of the Pacific; the writing in this collection highlights some of the strongest and most thoughtful literary voices of this time.

Other new work in the volume includes poetry by Korean poet Ko Un, Chinese poet Shi Zhi, and Americans Leonard Nathan, John McKernan, Joseph Millar, and Bradajo; and prose by Juan Carlos Onetti, George Evans, and Virgil Suárez. The art consists of a set of antique postcards depicting Viet Nam.

About the guest editors: Kevin Bowen served as a soldier in Viet Nam from 1968 to 1969. He is the cotranslator of Distant Road by Nguyen Duy, A Time Far Past by Luu Le, and Mountain River: Vietnamese Poetry from the Wars, 1948–1993. Bowen is also the author of two books of poetry: Forms of Prayer at the Hotel Edison and Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong. He is the director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Nguyen Ba Chung is a poet, translator, and essayist. He was born in 1949 in Kim Thanh District, Hai Duong Province, and moved to Saigon with his family in 1955. In 1971, after attending the Faculty of Letters in Saigon, he came to the United States to pursue a graduate degree in American literature at Brandeis University. He has been a research associate at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston since 1996 and is the author of four collections of poetry in Vietnamese and the cotranslator of numerous volumes into English.

200 pp., summer 2002 (14:1), $20

ISBN 978-0-8248-2581-0
Project Muse
JSTOR