Shallow Graves: Two Women and Vietnam

Two friends, an American woman teaching in Saigon in the early 1970s, and a Vietnamese woman who later comes to America, have composed a satisfying collection of one-page “prose-poems,” a term that suggests the verses’ straightforward narrative.

The American describes her apprehensive first walk to work in war-torn Saigon, a class discussion, a G.I. explaining to his girlfriend how much bigger the cabbages are back home, and other experiences related to and remote from the war. The Vietnamese tells more of her family, having grown up in the North, and how the wars against the French (“We especially hated their long noses”) and the Americans (“They thought they could buy everything”) affected her family and people generally. The authors nicely convey their impressions of life in Vietnam.