He is not for the squeamish but I loved reading this and will be reading more and more because a colleague who has her office down the hall from me loaned me a bunch of his books, a few of which she published in her small press, Tinfish. Linh stayed at her house when he came to do a few readings.

He does remind me of Kafka, the absurdists, really dry humor that makes me guffaw, and then suddenly I find myself in a Vietnam stripped of all the sentimentality and yet loved as a bleak fact.

Most traditional kind of sentiment in the book:

If a man can't walk on the ground, where can he walk? - it vaguely refers to land mines

This poem sticks with me. It has all of those elements I mentioned.

A Peripatetic Purveyor of Nothing

On the Avenue of Idleness, there is a man who pushes a pushcart around with
nothing on it. He rings a bell to announce his arrival. Children and other unde-
sireables like to throw rocks at him.
"I was never made out for this. I don't want to sell nothing. I don't even want to
buy nothing."
"So much for nothing today?"
"You better know it."
"A little cheaper by the dozen perhaps?"
"Not at this weight, ma'am."
"But my children are grossly underweight!"
"Like the billboard says, We can't modernize overnight."
"Please wrap it up then."

-Linh Dinh

I love Tinfish Press; I also absolutely love "The Dead" from this collection among many other gems!