Hoang Hung

AC Mong Hoang Hung

As a poet, journalist, and translator, Hoang Hung has long been an influential voice for freedom of expression. What a gift it is to hear him in Nightmares, the first full-length English translation of his prison poems. So intimate and immediate is that voice, that when Hung goes through the "tar-blackened iron door," we go with him. Hung's descriptions of his surroundings are unsparing. "Here is hell itself," he writes. Sleep is "blood-colored," the sky, "black and blue." We feel the cold of his cell, the longing for freedom and family. The power in these poems lies in their complexity. Bitterness, anger and despair run through them, yet the poet remains attentive to the slenderest symbols of hope. The "pinkish white, almost transparent" lizards make love beside a prison lamp "that radiates with the warmth of spring." In The Young Girl Who Just Arrived, the poet affirms his compassion when he hears a fellow prisoner singing in Chinese. My home is far away Your home is even farther Our homeward road to which we are both blind Well then, let us sing together. This collection is aptly named, full of nightmares that continue even after the prisoner is released. There are days when someone stares at him There are nights when fluttering voices question him. A pat on the shoulder startles him. Yet Nightmares is also an act of witness. Hung exposes, through his own story, the suffering of countless others under repressive regimes. His is the voice of dissident writers everywhere - honest, brave, and indispensable. - Ellen Bass American poet and co-author of The Courage to Heal, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets