Mai Der Vang’s poetry—lyrically insistent and visually compelling—constitutes a groundbreaking investigation into the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants. Primordial is a crucial turn to the ecological and generational impact of violence, a powerful and rousing meditation on climate, origin, and fate.

With profound and attentive care, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam. The saola looks like an antelope, with two long horns, and is related to wild cattle, though the saola has been placed in a genus of its own. Remarkably, the saola has only been known to the outside world since 1992, and sightings are so rare that it has now been more than a decade since the last known image of one was captured in a camera trap photo in 2013.

Primordial examines the saola’s relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival. Can a war-torn landscape and memory provide sanctuary, and what are the consequences for our climate, our origins, our ability to belong to a homeland? Written during a difficult pregnancy and postpartum period, Vang’s poems are urgent stays against extinction.

Arriving four years after her much-lauded Yellow Rain, Mai Der Vang’s Primordial (Graywolf, March 2025) is a visually expansive and linguistically captivating collection. Among its various poetic refrains is an examination of the long-term impact of violence on the Hmong people of Vietnam as well as the environmental consequences for the saola, an extremely endangered mammal of the region. 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

Three years ago, Mai Der Vang’s Yellow Rain, an expansive performance of documentary poetics grounded in the materiality of collaged archival documents, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She returns this March with a more contained third collection, Primordial, which also centers ongoing ramifications of the Vietnam war, and the submersion of truths, on Hmong people. Here, her focus turns to the saola, an elusive endangered animal sometimes referred to as the “asian unicorn” of Laos and Vietnam. Metaphor? Scientific evidence? Embodiment of the persistence of a people? 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. “Evolution/Absence” weaves statements such as “Hmong people exist/ I am a Hmong person who exists” and “The saola is a secret/ The saola exists.” These are poems of survival.
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub

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

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