EBOOK
About
Extinction Theory is a collection of pseudoscience poems that try to provide rationales for some of life's most salient mysteries. Where is God? What does it mean to belong? Who killed the dinosaurs? Kien Lam creates new worlds with new rules to better answer these perennial questions. His poetry is that of discovery, of looking at the world as if for the first time. Lam exposes the transitory and transcendent nature of things and how we find meaning.
At the heart of this collection is also a cataloging of the smaller "extinctions" in life. Every passing moment is the death of something, and try as we might to recreate the feeling, it can never be the same. Maybe it's a relationship. Maybe it's a donut. It changes its shape as we juxtapose it against something new. Extinction Theory is as much about language as it is about the absence of language. Of English, of Vietnamese, and then of neither.
At the heart of this collection is also a cataloging of the smaller "extinctions" in life. Every passing moment is the death of something, and try as we might to recreate the feeling, it can never be the same. Maybe it's a relationship. Maybe it's a donut. It changes its shape as we juxtapose it against something new. Extinction Theory is as much about language as it is about the absence of language. Of English, of Vietnamese, and then of neither.
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Reviews
"This book of theories, songs, mantras, and more-threaded through with flourishes of compassion for a father finding himself and maybe pathos for a mother who served as tether post for a speaker dizzied by colonizing language and the god it claimed to represent-it impels us to think hard about the word made flesh, or our existential fear made music, or the cultural alienation that doesn't tra
Kyle Dargan
"Kien Lam's poems are live wires, coursing with currents of feverish sonic play and bracing truths. Poem after poem, Extinction Theory tears out the root of the single origin story-and along with it, any overriding theory on love, masculinity, assimilation, disappearing fathers, exile-to find origins and the dense threads of meaning scattered everywhere. Across mesmeric pages, we have an insis
Jenny Xie
"Kien Lam's Extinction Theory is a beautiful, probing collection that develops its own creation stories that end in the grieving of one kind of life in favor of another. It asks existential questions about what it means to be the child of Vietnamese immigrants, wondering about love and belonging, place, and passage. It asks questions of God. Deft with word play and pathos and a biting wit, Lam's w
Cathy Linh Che