Now available
Graywolf Press, 2025
A testament to the interconnectedness of life across species and generations, and to the power of spirit, Mai Der Vang’s Primordial adapts the lyricism of her first book, Afterland, and the documentarian gaze of her previous book, Yellow Rain, to poetically present that which binds. Relational, vulnerable, and elegantly woven, Vang’s poems animate the endangered saola alongside the resilience of the Hmong people, juxtaposing the origins of life with the legacies we leave behind. In its honoring of the vulnerability and strength of motherhood, this book is a reminder that our survival is intertwined with the natural world at large, and a call to protect both.
hoa nguyen
There’s a way to set a line to remind a reader: poetry is incantation’s medium. Mai Der Vang’s Primordial, then, is a deep spell compendium composed of insistent repetition near graven in its gravity. Vang makes smoke out of LIGHT, planets with LANGUAGE, existence against erasure, and names from secrets, which is to say: this is remarkable poetry set to transfix.
douglas kearney
Vang’s urgent and inventive collection chronicles the biological and cultural circumstances of the critically endangered animal as a means of confronting our own animality. In the process, she interrogates our own precarity as a species (“A saola dies and takes this future with it.”), the dehumanization of the Hmong people, and how history bypasses the marginalized (of any species). “Primordial”makes beautiful use of innovative poetic forms to explore all this. Several poems are composed of a single, boldface sentence that extends across two pages, left to right… In these highly original poems, and throughout “Primordial,” Vang unpacks the sentences that history writes — their unrelenting march, their obsessive truncation — to reveal a stunning, revelatory language of fragility, extinction, and ancestral origin.
Christopher Kondrich, washington post
Vang’s expansive third collection . . . pays tribute to the vanishingly rare saola, an antelope-like forest mammal from the ‘feral heaven’ of Laos and Vietnam that is also, in Vang’s hands, a metaphor for the fate of the Hmong people.
new york times BOOK REVIEW
The saola morphs in purpose and presence across these poems, as Mai Der Vang continues to forge an ecopoetics that embodies intricate intersections of war, colonialism, environment, and refuge.
Rebecca Morgan Frank, lit hub
…[A] visually expansive and linguistically captivating collection… Vang’s exquisitely layered contemplations of existence, extinction, location, memory and identity can’t be distilled to one paragraph, nor will one be satisfied by a single reading of this highly anticipated collection.
mandana chaffa, Chicago review of books
Mai Der Vang masters the balance between a sense of direction and the spontaneity of thoughts and curiosity… Through resounding language and bold forms that explore what it means to exist and co-exist, to be threatened and to persist, Mai Der Vang creates a dreamscape in which time and space collapse and one experiences the past and the present, the personal and the external, within a single body.
Thảo Tô, asian review of books
Primordial by Mai Der Vang marks another splendid triumph for the poet. By bringing to the page the saola (an endangered, almost never seen animal mostly in Southeast Asia) alongside a maturing “I,” it brings language to all the lives, places, and histories unseen. The collection delights in exploding known forms and creating new aesthetics as it considers what is environmentally human, animal, and landscape. Her language is focused and luscious, with never a word or a space out of place…
poetry northwest
The insistent and formally experimental third collection from Vang turns her incisive poetic eye to the critically endangered saola—a bovine native to Laos and Vietnam—to explore themes of colonialism, war, and extinction. . . . An ambitious and impassioned contribution to contemporary poetry.
publishers weekly
A beautifully lyrical investigation of self, Hmong history and diasporic identity, and motherhood… Primordial uses poetic form and format to further connect its themes and unite personal, mystical, historical, and scientific worlds…
Paul Christiansen, saigoneer
With lyrical propensity and innovative visual form, Mai Der Vang’s poetry collection Primordial delves into the essence of an endangered animal… She inserts diction that is fervid, devices layered with meaning, and form that is wholly unconventional and novel. Vang pushes the boundaries of what poetry can be whilst simultaneously dressing the wounds from decades ago…
alexandra cipriani, october hill
Vang draws poignant associations between the precarity faced by a creature on the verge of extinction and the plight of Hmong refugees seeking safety and identity. The result is an intimate collection that meditates on climate and survival both in the outdoor world and within the family.
alta journal
This collection is an abundance of beautiful language that is grounded and terrestrial, and at the same time, out of this world.
angelica flores, newcity lit