Cathy Linh Che w/ Alex Gallo-Brown and Paul Hlava Ceballos

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.

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. is an eye-opening, inspiring, and hopeful linked-essay collection recounting the amazing everyday encounters of city bus driver, Nathan Vass whose life's motto is if you give kindness, you'll get kindness. Vass tests this theory on the roughest nighttime routes in Seattle. The results illuminate the challenges of poverty, homelessness, and crossing class boundaries. Vass intertwines personal stories of trauma from his survival of the 2015 Paris terror attacks, showing that we are all struggling with tragedy. These brief but meaningful encounters foster healing for everyone involved. The ordinary becomes extraordinary when he chooses to see the beauty of each person who steps onto his bus. Come along for the ride.

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.

Alex Gallo-Brown is the author of Variations of Labor (2019), a collection of poems and stories, and the co-director with Piotr Migula of The Good Salami (2025), a very short film based on one of his poems. He has contributed articles and essays to publications that include The Stranger, The South Seattle Emerald, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Northwest. In 2019, he was awarded the Barry Lopez Fellowship from Seattle's Hugo House. He lives in central Seattle with his wife and two daughters.

Paul Hlava Ceballos has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Artist Trust, and the Poets House. His work has been published in POETRY, Pleiades, Triquarterly, Poetry Northwest, and BOMB, among other journals and newspapers. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood shares pages with Quenton Baker, Dr. Christina Sharpe, and Torkwase Dyson. He received his MFA from New York University and currently lives in Seattle.

Pre-order your copy of Becoming Ghost here.

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