Becoming Ghost - by Cathy Linh Che (Paperback)

About the Book

"The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now"--

Book Synopsis

2025 National Book Award Finalist
Ms. Magazine's Best Poetry of 2024 and 2025
Electric Literature's Best Poetry Collections, 2025
NPR's Books We Love 2025

The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debut Split, Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che's parents' experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker's disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness.

Review Quotes

"A feat of intertextual poetics, a model with which to re-examine personal narratives and how they reverberate through history, through art, and otherwise."
--Soapberry Review

"In 1976, the author's parents, then Vietnam War survivors living in a refugee camp in the Philippines, were able to earn relatively good wages by becoming extras in Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now. They mostly played civilian casualties or Vietcong snipers who were background scenery or 'ghosts' in the director's operatic but ultimately hollow Vietnam parable. Cathy Linh Che restructures lines in Coppola's filmscript to create dramatic monologues that lend texture and corporeality to her parents' cinema-worthy history. Her approach is both poignant and humble. While wishing to rectify the past by serving as a vessel for her parents' voices, Che is fully aware that such an attempt at capturing their elusive narratives is still a scripted effort."
--Thúy Ðinh, NPR

"In her sophomore collection, Cathy Linh Che recenters Vietnamese experiences in the story of her parents, who fled the Vietnam War as refugees only to be cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola's film about the conflict, Apocalypse Now. As contributors to the film, they were denied both dialogue and credit. Writing in her own voice and those of her parents, Che also grapples with the pain of telling family stories after being disowned by her father."
--Electric Lit Best Poetry Collections of 2025

"'Dance is a body's refusal/to die, ' writes Cathy Linh Che in this gorgeous and searing second collection of poems, the culmination of a long-anticipated multivalence project--one that vivifies her parent's experience being recruited as extras in the Coppola film Apocalypse Now. The poems in Becoming Ghost stun--they affirm and re-center those exiled from the rusted foundations of American mythology, they refuse to back away as they build new structures to reckon with not just our history but our present. These poems don't just sing: they break my heart and re-affirm life in the same long and glorious breath."
--Sally Wen Mao, author of The Kingdom of Surfaces and Ninetails

"'We were diligent in our portrayal, ' says a parent speaker. So, too, is this collection: diligent not toward facts but toward feeling, irony, hungry for absence and its meaning."
--Poetry Northwest's Spring 2025 Favorites

"A revelation. Harrowing, lyrical, surprisingly restrained at times while also fiercely visceral, Becoming Ghost is, above all, courageous in its willingness to confront the conflicts within the author's own family without letting the world off the hook."
--Poetry Northwest

"Cathy Linh Che's Becoming Ghost is a new masterpiece of American love lyric, in the vein of Rita Dove's timeless Thomas and Beulah or Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic. Love: 'To misunderstand / each other, but to stick around.' Love: 'I mapped our escape.' Love: 'I knew you in your bowl cut, the red car in the driveway, the lens of your father's eye.' I'm getting goosebumps just typing. Che is a mighty poet, nimble across a variety of forms and voices, with a dazzling instinct for how one image, line, photograph, might illuminate the next. Becoming Ghost is an indelible reminder of all the people, known and unknown, who loved us enough to survive."
--Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr and Pilgrim Bell

"Cathy Linh Che's Becoming Ghost magnifies how the golden shovel form both buries and unearths a poem's roots. Sentences unfold down Che's line breaks, generating shadow scripts and ghost dialogues in a language hidden 'like gold poured into a molar or cotton gauze stuffed into a cheek.' These poems reconcile myth and history, inheritance and upheaval, reconfiguring family memoir as a vehicle for empathy, experimentation, and recovery. Becoming Ghost is a marvel of form and spirit."
--Terrance Hayes, author of So To Speak and American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

"Cathy Linh Che's poetry vibrate with the rage and ache that accompany revisionist history work. The way she takes Coppola and the exploitative Apocalypse Now to task left me agape--these poems break the grammars of male and white-centric narratives."
--Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures

About the Author

Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Split, winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, An Asian American A to Z: A Children's Guide to Our History, and Becoming Ghost. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, and McSweeney's and she has received awards from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She currently lives in New York City.