BECOMING GHOST

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

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.

Cathy Linh Che’s Becoming Ghost is a new masterpiece of American lyric love, 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

“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 Ninetails and The Kingdom of Surfaces

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 and Ghost Of

"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

"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

"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

"'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

“Che masterfully depicts the duality in the potential of art—something through which we can understand ourselves or lose ourselves. This, too, maps onto the familial frameworks; where is there love, and where is there harm? In the long title poem ‘Becoming Ghost,’ she writes: ‘I am asking you / to look me in the face / and say, Father. / I am / asking you / to see me,’ playing with various forms of address and the act of seeing/being seen. Though it is a fulfilling work on its own, Becoming Ghost pairs beautifully with Che’s documentary We Were the Scenery dir. Christopher; like the book, it details her parents’ time as extras. It is experimental, a poem of a film. This cross-media experience is recursive—what the documentary shares about Che’s family is only bolstered by the attempts of the collection, and so on. Well deserving of its National Book Award shortlisting, Becoming Ghost is a feat of intertextual poetics, a model with which to re-examine personal narratives and how they reverberate through history, through art, and otherwise.”
– Summer Farah, author of The Hungering Years

AN ASIAN AMERICAN A TO Z: A CHILDREN’S GUIDE TO OUR HISTORY

A comprehensive and spirited exploration of Asian American history—its movements, cultures, and key figures—beautifully illustrated and compellingly told for readers of all ages.

Co-authors Cathy Linh Che and Kyle Lucia Wu take us on a journey through stories of celebration and resistance: the Third World Liberation Front, the Muslim Ban, Japanese American incarceration camps, Padma Lakshmi, Rashida Tlaib, Sunisa Lee, and more. It is a history of struggle, but also one of great triumph, brought to life with colorful and dynamic illustrations by Kavita Ramchandran.

Written by the directors of Kundiman—an organization dedicated to nurturing Asian American writers—An Asian American A to Z is a book for children of all backgrounds and a vital resource for tomorrow's organizers. Asian American identity formation is expansive yet under-taught, and this book is a necessary intervention that will ground readers in joy, history, and solidarity.

An essential collection for any children's library--it's the book I wish I had for my own children when they were young. Informative, engaging and delicious rhymes–Che and Wu are simply enchanting storytellers. This book is foundational and intersectional, providing just the right historical touch to pique kids' curiosity and encourage further reading for all!
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil

This is the book I wish I had when I was growing up. It’s the book I’m glad I have now, one that I can read to my own children. Personal and political, playful and provocative, this rhyming guide brilliantly condenses rich, complicated Asian American histories. It’s an A to Z book that isn’t the last word on Asian American cultures but rather the beginning of many conversations.
—Viet Thanh Nguyen

In An Asian American A to Z, Che, Wu, and Ramchandran share a beautiful, bright, and inclusive history of Asian America that is sure to inspire and delight readers. Asian Americans have much to be proud of, and much to look forward to.
—Sarah Park Dahlen

Che and Wu center Asian American figures and history as well as intersectionally aware concepts in this activist-leaning abecedarian....[A] hopeful, liberation-minded primer that culminates by speaking to the 'power in knowing Asian American history.
––Publisher’s Weekly

Published May 2, 2023.

SPLIT

Winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award
Academy of American Poets’ Standout Books List
Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Creative: Writing Poetry

In this stunning debut, we follow one woman's profoundly personal account of sexual violence against the backdrop of cultural conflict deftly illustrated through her parents' experiences of the Vietnam War, immigration, and its aftermath. By looking closely at landscape and psyche, Split explores what happens when deep trauma occurs and seeks to understand what it means to finally become whole.

“To be a daughter, a survivor, and a poet are all aligned in the need “to rewrite everything,” a need that [Cathy Linh Che] navigates with brutality and tenderness, devastation and irrepressible endurance.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Perhaps the writer’s most difficult task is to render the catastrophic linked non-stories that comprise transgenerational trauma. Cathy Linh Che’s collection Split accomplishes this nearly impossible challenge with uncommon grace and power. Each poem unwinds the cataclysm of personal wounding by making itself irresistibly beautiful.”
—Los Angeles Review

“Cathy Linh Che [balances] personal traumatic experiences, widely considered indescribable, against the ethical necessity of imagining and depicting. Crucially, [she demonstrates] that history resides in the body, rather than in murky or contentious fact. Split… [transfers] experience back onto the cultures that have enabled both the violation and the silencing of particular bodies and voices.”
—Boston Review

“In her debut collection Cathy Linh Che summons forth a daughter-self that jolts, blazes. It’s a voice that orbits a harrowing girlhood and a war-torn Vietnam. It’s a voice that veers into tenderness and ferocity. It’s an exquisite voice. Line after line burns with pictorial verve, melodic grace. This voice, this daughter-self, is a stunning and scorching performance.”
—Eduardo C. Corral

“Cathy Linh Che’s debut examines the complex ways in which the past imperils our present. In these heartbreaking poems, rape and abuse are not private traumas, but a terrible inheritance that continues through generations. Here, the Vietnam War becomes a psychic backdrop against which one family still struggles to heal, reliving past cultural wounds that traumatize, yet never define it.”
—Paisley Rekdal

“A brave, delicate, and terrifying account of what we do to each other. Here we cross over into a landscape where beauty interrogates, and we encounter a voice that refuses to let us off the hook.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa

Order Here