Becoming Ghost: Poetry [Paperback]

Winner of the 2026 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award
2025 National Book Award Finalist
Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Finalist

2026 APALA Literature Awards - Asian American Poetry Winner
Ms. Magazine’s Best Poetry of 2024 and 2025
Electric Literature’s Best Poetry Collections, 2025
NPR’s Books We Love 2025
2026 ALA RUSA Notable Poetry List

The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola’sApocalypse Now.

The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debutSplit,Becoming Ghostdocuments Cathy Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s filmApocalypse 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 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 Cit