Ho Chi Minh

A Speculative Life in Verse and Other Poems

Author: Benjamin Goluboff Series: Crossroads Poetry

Through a series of narrative poems Goluboff explores the era and a life of North Vietnamese Leader Ho Chi Minh in his verse portrait of a man and his place in the world. Other additional poems add depth to this exploration.

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Summary

Description

Almost fifty years after his death, Ho Chi Minh remains a deeply divisive figure -- heroic revolutionary, or brutal dictator, depending on your perspective on the Vietnam wars. Not overtly political, the poems in this collection interrogate Ho's life and wars with a lyricism that is both dark and inventive. Many versions of the man inhabit these poems: Ho as trickster and tyrant, lover and ghost. Goluboff's imagination travels from fact to fancy with disarming grace. This debut collection also includes a suite of poems about photographs of and by Allen Ginsberg, and another group whose subjects range from classic photographs to Chicago graffiti and the battle of Fredericksburg. Entertaining and deftly voiced, these are poems that will stay with you

Critic Reviews

"Benjamin Goluboff writes the strongest kind of narrative poems. They are the kind that make history immediate, alive and real. Equally fascinating as his portrait of Ho is a brief life of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg gleaned from photographs of the poet and his friends. A concluding section takes you from the tagged streets of Chicago, through the battle of Fredericksburg, to an imagined photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his circle. All are written with a deft hand and consummate skill."

Alan Catlin, editor of Misfitmagazine, author of Drunk and Disorderly, and Alien Nation.

"Benjamin Goluboff is a remarkable poet, his voice and his world are his own. The juxtaposition of Ho Chi Minh, Allen Ginsberg, and the big-shouldered city of Chicago is both jarring and fitting. Savvy and surprising, there is a rare quality of imagined reality in this collection and in all its people and places."

Donald Anderson, editor of War, Literature, and the Arts, author of Fire Road and Gathering Noise from My Life: a Camouflaged Memoir.

About the Author

Benjamin Goluboff teaches English at Lake Forest College. He has written about a variety of topics in American literature, including the literature of the Vietnam war, and placed imaginative writing - poetry, fiction, and essays - in many small-press journals over the years.