A Conversation with Mai Der Vang
BY ELIZABETH BOLAÑOS
Mai Der Vang is the author of Primordial (Graywolf Press, 2025), Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017). Her honors include the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, among others. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.
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Elizabeth Bolaños: A bouquet of gratitude to you for the opportunity to pry your newest collection. Like your previous ones, Primordial explores intense facets of what being Hmong has meant for you, and heavy bones in Hmong histories. One theme I immediately found entwining these was environmental preservation. The saola, a severely endangered mammal with smoothly pointed horns, last photographed in 2013, (as you inform in the poem “Camera Trap Triptych”), roams the pages. In the opening poem, “ANIMAL,” a stanza reads “I come to you / as the animal who / wants to be found.” It opened a reminder to my own animalistic nature, how ultimately, human beings are at the mercy of how we choose to care for the planet’s other species. What led you to venture into such urgent territory?
Mai Der Vang: I’ve long thought about the saola and its connection to a landscape that has been ravaged by war, bombs, environmental devastation, and geopolitical conflict. The saola is a highly rare and critically endangered animal endemic to the Annamite Mountains between Laos and Vietnam. It looks like an antelope but is a relative of wild cattle. Saola was first known to science in 1992 and considered to be one of the greatest zoological discoveries of the twentieth century, but locals had long known of the saola well before scientists came along. That a large mammal was living in this remote area unbeknownst to the rest of the world was astonishing. Conservationists estimate there are fewer than one hundred saola remaining in the wild.
And then there’s the Secret War, too, the covert operation and proxy war schemed by the CIA and U.S. government whereby Hmong boys and men were used and coerced into fighting and dying on behalf of this country. I wondered about the ways that a war-torn landscape might also serve as a thriving ecosystem and sanctuary supporting rare and elusive species like the saola. I thought about how the environment, the flora, and the fauna all become casualties of war, forced to evolve or go into hiding to survive extermination. With this came larger considerations around survival and extinction, saola on the run, Hmong on the run, and a return to primordial memories amid a planet in decline.
EB: One of my favorite features about your work is your use of hybridity, textures, and experimental forms. For example, in poems like “I Understand This Light to be My Home,” in which the reader’s eyes meet a cloud of the words “light” and “language” coated in differing shades of black through multiple pages. Or the node “Absence Behind Me,” where the stanzas branch from the title via small circles like trees’ fruit. What’s at the root of such creativity? What comes first to you: the words or form?
MDV: With the more visual poems, I was interested in expanding my use of the line by moving both outside it and inside it, both away from it and into it, if that makes sense. That’s especially the case with the node poems where the source line in the middle functions as a thread connecting the entire poem together. The sub-lines branching from the source line push out from the center. I wanted to try something that would lean into the line while simultaneously resisting it.
The “light” poem was my attempt to literally make light appear on the page. I overlayed the word “light” hundreds of times over itself while also experimenting with gradients. If you were to scroll quickly through a PDF version of the poem, you’d see the animation effect of the circular shape darkening before your eyes as if a light were growing brighter, or you might see it as a dimming or waning of the light. Typically for me, the words come before the form, but it changes with each poem, and I can never tell which way it’ll go.
EB: Extending from my previous inquiry, is there an intended way to experience the shapeshifting poem “I Understand This Light to be My Home”? A particular way to read or hear it? The words first live around the page horizontally, similar to traditional forms, before clustering around like an uncatchable entity in the pages that follow. It’s just beautiful.
MDV: I’ve read the poem once in public and it was helpful to have it also displayed on screen. Rest assured, I did not read the word “light” a hundred times as the page might suggest. I read the word a few times, paced myself through the poem, and took the lines and phrasing more slowly. I think hearing the poem and then seeing it visually on screen makes for an interesting experience and only adds to the poem’s effect. More importantly, I hope readers will find their own unique ways to read and engage with the poem. I’m actually quite curious as to how people will read it.
EB: Introducing the powerful poems “Relict” and “Otherworldly” are quotes from William deBuys’ book The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures. A bittersweet kiss to the saola’s nickname: the Asian unicorn. Would you share something about the process of embedding these in the book? Although I haven’t read deBuys’ book, I felt both hope and mourning when connecting the quotes to the poems that followed, the former for the possibility of the saola’s existence, the magic of its elusivity. The latter for the possibility of its extinction, something to be believed as a fairytale.
MDV: To write many of the poems, I drew from deBuys’ book as a source of inspiration and knowledge. The book helped me gain greater understanding of the environmental, biological, and social factors impacting the saola. In the case of the two poems you cite, I included epigraphs from deBuys’ book to provide additional context for the poems. “Relict” looks back at the saola’s taxonomic roots to explore how it has managed to survive in its primitive form, and “Otherworldly” was my attempt to confront the romanticizing of an animal who is very much real and true.
I think it can be easy to mythologize an animal we’ve never seen, or one that is so endangered we don’t even know if it still exists. In crafting this collection, I kept in mind the ethics involved with writing about the environment or about an endangered animal. It was important to remind myself that I’m writing about a living creature here and not something that is meant to serve as a literary metaphor for extinction.
EB: Readers are given glimpses into your journey through motherhood, especially in the poems “Origin,” and the node “I carried you, placenta.” My favorite line from “Origin” is “made into the baby, quickening to a cadence we have / not yet learned, watery [language] of the womb.” Would you mind sharing more about how it felt to create this book while creating your son (Máximo), especially considering the extensive research noted at the end of the book and the physical and emotional tolls that pregnancy and birth can instill?
MDV: It was somewhat strange to be writing about an endangered animal while struggling through a pregnancy. It certainly wasn’t something I expected, but it seemed to naturally come together in some areas of the book (my existence, the existence I was birthing, and the saola’s existence). I wrote some of the poems while pregnant and while being mostly bedridden due to medical issues, and then I wrote a lot more poems later during postpartum. I couldn’t always sit in front of a laptop to draft poems, so I often wrote using the Notes app on my phone while lying in bed. I did more thinking on the fly, too, while feeding the baby, or before falling asleep. I also wrote late at night or whenever I could squeeze in fifteen minutes of quiet. I also had moments, too, when I didn’t want to write anything, and that was okay.
To be pregnant and have a child and then try to write made it so I had to work in ways that were different from my previous two books. It felt entirely impossible at times, and challenging as it all was, necessity required me to recalibrate my approach to the poems.
EB: There are poems where a young girl’s memories, some terribly traumatic, are titled as those of a saola’s. A striking line, for example, from “Saola Prepares for Ritual in Suburbia” is “Someone once told you: you conspire with the devil / when you feed your ancestors, you reek of witchcraft.” I also found this in lines from the poem “Evolution, Absence” such as “I am a private person / The saola prefer privacy.” I felt you were not only sharing your personal connection with this creature, but helping readers understand the importance of finding an affinity with other animals, too. Are there other creatures that you feel an attachment with?
MDV: It’s interesting you point out the series of pieces about the saola and about living and growing up as a daughter of Hmong refugees in California. These are pieces that center the Hmong American experience while drawing in the saola as a continued part of that discourse or conversation. I also found it a bit wild to think about the saola living in America as a refugee. And I think you’re right about the other piece serving as an invitation to the reader to feel an affinity with animals. I’d be thrilled if my book produced that effect for a reader! I’ve always been a lover and watcher of hawks and owls, perhaps any raptor in general. I love elephants, horses, wolves, and buffalo, too.
EB: In the node: “However bleeding,” a miscarriage is at the heart, and in it the line “If all the brokenness transmutes into a monarch / and we endure a new beginning, / then let us turn into what / the light becomes.” Light is so alive and bright in this book in contrast to the darker contents. Is it alright to ask about the light involved in this significant piece of your life? For such a short poem, I felt it gifted me multitudes of courage and heartache.
MDV: I’m glad the light resonated with you. This piece was a difficult one for me but it seemed appropriate to explore considering the book’s larger themes around existence and survival. The poem is about going through the motions of pregnancy loss and a feeling of having fallen into the shadows of that experience. It happened to me a few years ago and somehow became part of this collection. I think of the light as a contrast to the darkness of that moment, the shadow enveloping the light and the light attempting to reach back in return. Perhaps at the very heart, this poem is a reconciliation between light and shadow. Light in its ability to reveal itself as one of the earliest sources of primordial energy. I think of “shadow” as the work that takes place within, a continual honing and wading through the murk of who we are, not unlike the Jungian notion of the shadow self.
EB: There’s an unnatural dynamic that exists between those involved in the bloodshed of war, in which both share the role of being the hunter and the hunted, unlike animals who are naturally born as predator or prey. I was thinking about this as I read the pain conveyed in poems like “Departures,” “Battalions of Irregular Force,” and “Autonomous Sky.” From the latter: “The shape of a bullet inside the shape of a man in the shape of the night.” Equally haunting, from “One Nation under Shadow Warfare,” “People learn to shift into animal / endeavor hiding as a saola.” I learned from the book that the saola were hunted, ironically, on lands where locals were victims of war violence and aftermath. Does it ever feel overwhelming at times to write about tragedies? Human and animal violence?
MDV: Absolutely. It is entirely overwhelming to continually move through different layers of the same tragedy. But I think that’s the work of poetry, to push me into and through those layers so that I might survive to see what possibilities emerge on the other side. When I first set about writing these poems about the saola, I didn’t immediately consider they would also be about the war. But the more I wrote, the more I realized the tenuous existence and interconnectedness of all people, plants, and living creatures who share in this particular Southeast Asian landscape, and who share, as a result, in its history and wounds of war.
I’m thinking, too, about how the local indigenous tribes hunted the saola for subsistence and survival, and how Hmong hunted them as well. But the saola’s largest threat stems from snares set up by poachers who are hunting other animals. Caught in the crossfire, the saola become bycatch in the process. People and animals are pitted against each other in a way that ominously echoes colonial practices of divide and conquer. Those who hunted the saola for subsistence become the hunted during the war who then become the refugees hounded in new countries. I’m both awed and overwhelmed at the idea that this animal, the saola, is for me the source and connection back to the things I’d been thinking and writing about all these years.
EB: In the poem “Hmong, an Ethnographic Study of Other,” you write about an article published in an old issue of the Journal of the Siam Society. Said article reads as a racist documentation of the observation of people of Hmong ancestry. They used descriptors like “misshapen.” It’s truly disturbing. To quote directly from this poem “Not a face, but acidic. / Not a human, but half of something.” Reading this evoked layers of memories I wanted to bury, regarding being Latina, but I was reminded, and for that matter grateful, of the benefits of exposing things like this, of how future generations can learn to make healthier histories when learning from the past. While conducting research of such vulgarities, did you find none of it surprised you?
MDV: Being Hmong, there have been moments when I’ve felt like a subject of anthropological study or an amusement for someone’s cultural curiosity when they experience the slight shock of meeting someone Hmong. It’s unfortunately not new to the Hmong experience so I wasn’t surprised much when I encountered this article, but it’s nonetheless unsettling.
The article’s offensive discourse speaks directly to the history of colonial intrusion and cultural infringement that impacted Hmong society in the decades leading up to the war. I’ve always wanted to explore this specific tension in a poem rooted in some study of pseudo-scientific racism and this article served as the perfect “subject” or “case study” for my little creative experiment (yes, roles now reversed).
That’s what I love about writing poems. Poetry allows for a restoration of agency through acts of linguistic subversion, and through a disassembling and reassembling of language on one’s terms. It allows for a rebalancing of the scales. I wrote this poem as a response to the article but also to call attention to the repugnant ways Hmong people were depicted for the purposes of scholarship.
EB: In such a tumultuous time, when so much freedom is being threatened, it was heartwarming to recall that the freedom to make art and consume it still exists. That work like yours inspires others to try. Could you offer a bit of solace for those who might be afraid to express themselves through art?
MDV: You just have to do it, there’s no other way around it. We are living in such volatile times, and it feels like everything is at stake because it is. As I write this, the media is reporting that Israel has essentially reignited its campaign of genocide by breaching the ceasefire and launching a new round of attacks on Gaza. The unlawful deportation of immigrants, the firing of federal employees, the dismissing of measures to protect reproductive rights and trans people, and the elimination of diversity initiatives at the hands of this corrupt and heinous government continue to plague this country. Not to also mention climate and economic disaster lingering in the forecast while social media feels like it has become a noise machine of itself.
To try and make art or write poems at this time could seem like a frivolous and fraught endeavor, and there’s likely some truth to that. Can poetry and art still save us in these precarious times? I think the argument can go both ways, but what remains possible in my mind is that every time I sit down to labor with language and do the work of the poetry, I feel transformed in that one moment of writing that poem. Maybe it’s about undergoing an individual revolution that in turn shapes and contributes to the collective whole that then ignites and invites the potential for larger transformation. We still have a very long way to go, and it won’t be easy to bounce back from this destruction, but maybe the risk of poetry is what we must take to see our world changed in the long term for the better.
