The secret of Hoa Sen by Phan Quế Mai Nguyễn and translated by Bruce Weigl, Nguyen Phan Que Mai

This is poetry from Vietnam.

The secret of Hoa Sen by Phan Quế Mai Nguyễn translated by Bruce Weigl, Nguyen Phan Que Mai is published by BOA Editions, Ltd.. This is a Book originally written in Vietnamese. This was published in 2014.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781938160523E12.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The secret of Hoa Sen, translated with Bruce Weigl and associated here with the poet herself in the translator field, gives English-language readers a Vietnamese collection shaped by lotus, secrecy, resilience, and cultural memory. The lotus is a powerful image because it belongs equally to beauty and mud. That duality feels like a useful way into the book. The poems can be read as acts of preservation, but not in a static way. They carry voice, family, land, and survival into a present tense. Published by BOA Editions, the collection belongs on the shelf as a Vietnamese work of tenderness and witness, where beauty is not escape from suffering but one of the ways to endure it.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.