Here, the most innovative contemporary Vietnamese-American writers explore thematic and stylistic territory previously overlooked in other collections, which have traditionally focused on the all-too- expected theme of war.
Watermark lifts all constraints, leaving the works to reset the boundaries for themselves. And they do-using poetry, fiction, and experimental forms to venture further into the fringes of the Vietnamese-American psyche. There they find a dead dog and hockey puck, a frozen (literally) grandmother, a hairpiece, Gertrude Stein, and a stick of spearmint gum. Here fiction and poetry reflect and refract on adolescence, sexuality, language, death, and distance. The result is a sly, haunting, wry look at life anywhere.
