Saturday Review: “The Kindness in Anger,” a review by Onyx Bradley of Eric Tran’s Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke (2022) in NCLR Online Spring 2025.
Onyx Bradley reviews a recent collection of Tran’s poetry that touches on LGBTQ+ grief while not “letting the poems get too dark”. Bradley describes Tran’s poetry as a “riveting collection that centers on the poet’s experiences as a queer Vietnamese American poet while also focusing on his career as a psychiatrist and the deaths he’s experienced both on the job and during his studies at the UNC School of Medicine.” Tran poems are often “about the specific type of grief that hangs over LGBTQ+ individuals’ lives, so many of which end far too early.”
Tran’s collection is separated into four sections and Bradley gives a glimpse into the themes and poems of each section. They end the review with, “Given the injustices and disappointments the speaker has suffered, one might expect the final poems in this collection to lash out angrily at the perpetrators. Instead, Tran ends the book with “Angier, NC,” in which he wishes others better luck than he had:
I wish you the bounty
of double coupon day, of dented cans
sold for cheap. A slab of bloody roast
with the most perfect marble.
A flat of strawberries near spoil,
right when they’re sweetest.”
Read the entire review here! And order a copy of the book here.
