We Play a Game

We Play a Game is a book of poetry by Duy Doan. The book was published by Yale University Press as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 2018, a competition in which promising young poets submit their debut poetry manuscripts with the publication of the manuscript as the prize. The poems explore Doan's experiences and feelings of displacement as a Vietnamese-American, illustrating daily life in both Vietnam and in America.

Doan writes in both Vietnamese and English and refers to several literal "games," such as soccer, as well as social games, such as how language barriers inhibit communication. For example, in "The Roundworm Travels up from the Foot," Doan compares boxing and dancing. In boxing, one makes oneself a smaller target, just as a dancer may do in a crowd of dancers to remain anonymous. Doan writes, "One goal: to be a string undulating between two fixed points."

Doan also refers to violence in several of his poems. In "Wristwatch," a father accosts his son with a keychain, heavy with thirty or more keys. Likewise, the mother figure in "Crayola" hits her daughter hard enough to knock her down.



The violence that pervades Doan's work likely comes from the violence from which his parents had fled. Doan's parents had fled war-torn Vietnam, where scenes like the ones described in in the poem "History Lesson from Anh Hai" may have been commonplace. In it, a child cries after his father disappears into the jungle. "It was a sad time." Doan writes, "A nun and monk were made to fornicate in the street. Once I heard about a monk who died setting himself on fire."

The poems tend to skip around in identity. One poem may give a family history from Vietnam while another finds itself in modern, American suburbia. Sometimes the speaker seems male, sometimes female, and never with a clear sexual preference. There are also several poems dedicated to the concept of transformation. In one such poem, "Love Trinkets," Doan describes the speaker's past lovers, some men, some women, and sometimes both at once.

Doan both celebrates and feels disconnected from his Vietnamese heritage. In "romanticizing vietnam," the speaker tells of the Vietnamese citizens singing about the beauty of the moon, the lotus, and how the language seems to rhyme. He adds near the end: "I fail to see/meaning in the white lotus," perhaps expressing how he doesn't understand parts of the Vietnamese culture and, by proxy, his heritage.



The poems also address religion, with Doan writing in one verse, "I should write as I pray./Or I should stop writing." In another poem, entitled "You," the speaker tells the story of a man who makes love to another man's wife near a sheep farm. Doan begins the poem, "You never told her about Jesus. The way/the truth plants itself in good soil/only to come forth later into the sun/is like the path to salvation. The Serpent told you/to take her." The speaker draws explicit parallels between adultery and the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden, simultaneously telling the "You" in question that he didn't present a Christian facade to his lover.

The book of poetry was well-received by critics; Publishers Weekly called the collection "not an obvious choice for a big prize, but it reveals itself to be a deserving one." Nina MacLaughlin of The Boston Globe wrote, "These are intimate, mischievous poems, alternately wry, forthright, vulnerable, winking and sincere." While the Library Journal wrote, "Bold, bright, yet decidedly unsettled and unsettling, this first collection...doesn't so much explore Doan's Vietnamese American experience as defy it."

Doan has also published his poems in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Slate, and TriQuarterly. He has an MFA in poetry from Boston University and is a Kundiman fellow. He is currently the director of the Favorite Poem Project, a foundation dedicated to the vocal art of poetry. It encourages people around the world to submit videos or audio of themselves reading their favorite poems, sets up highly-publicized poetry readings, and creates videos of readings.  Robert Pinksy, the founder of the project, believes, "By reading poems we love aloud, we can learn how much pleasure there can be in the sounds of words."



The Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition is a contest put on by Yale University Press every year that seeks to publish debut collections from up-and-coming poets. It is the oldest annual literary award in America, having been founded in 1919. Notable judges of the competition include W.H. Auden and Stephen Vincent Benet. Distinguished debuting poets who won the competition include Adrienne Rich, James Write, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, John Hollander, Carolyn Forche, and Rober Hass (who would later become the Poet Laureate of the United States).