Synopses & Reviews
Mouth, Sugar, & Smoke howls and hungers.
This collection, which won the Diode Editions 2021 Full-Length Book Prize, grieves a lover lost to addiction and also swims in the intoxication of desire. While the poems in Mouth, Sugar, & Smoke portray a yearning for intimacy, they create spaces to experience the duality of pleasure and mourning. Even when Tran writes under formal constraint, like the crown of sonnets, these poems struggle and break and, in doing so, explore queer and transformative ways of wanting and being wanted.
Review
“Wounds, here, are not ornamental. Tenderness, here, is as restless and resilient as pain. The poems refuse transformation, superficial resolutions. Instead, the language — unsparing, striking — attends to addiction and death with grace, awe. The emotional complexity is mirrored structurally: the lines waterfall and halt, a sonnet crown jolts awake the mind, sentences simmer with lyrical momentum. Eric Tran’s second book is heart-rich and deftly written — the poems will stay with you long after you finish reading it.” Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
About the Author
Eric Tran is a queer Vietnamese poet and the author of Mouth, Sugar, & Smoke (Diode Editions) and The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer (Autumn House Press). He serves as an associate editor for Orison Books and a poetry reader for the Los Angeles Review. He has received awards and recognition from Prairie Schooner, New Delta Review, Best of the Net, and others. His work appears in RHINO, 32 Poems, the Missouri Review and elsewhere. He is a physician completing his fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry in Portland, Oregon.