Fourteen Hills contributor Linh Dinh releases new book: “Some Kind of Cheese Orgy”

Prominent Vietnamese poet and past Fourteen Hills contributor Linh Dinh has a new book out Oct. 15 from Chax Press called Some Kind of Cheese Orgy. The title alone makes me want to read it. Dinh is a writer who takes poetry just seriously enough.

 “Imagine a concoction that mixes Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Celine’s Bardum, frank, rollicking humor and hair-raising disgust. After adding fish sauce, a smelly cheese and sexual sweat, shake vigorously. Out of the bottle rises Linh Dinh.” That’s poet and critic John Yau’s description of the new collection on SPD’s website (where you can buy the book for $16). If you want to sample it first, here’s the title poem of the collection.

Linh Dinh, based in Philadelphia, has already embarked on a traveling tour around the states, and our readers outside the Bay Area can catch him here:

- Chicago, October 24, 7 p.m. at Myopic Books.
- San Marcos, Texas (at Texas State University), October 27, 3 p.m. in room 315 of the Academic Services Building South. This is not a poetry reading but a discussion of Linh’s photography project, State of the Union.
- Austin, October 27, 7 p.m. at Possum Casa de Nguyn Smith, 2208 Trailside Dr. #A
- Tuscon, venue and time to be announced
- Orange County, CA, November 3, 4 p.m. at Chapman University
- Kansas City, MO, November 7, 7 p.m. at Kansas City Art Institute
- Glassboro, N.J., November 9, 7 p.m. at the Art Gallery at Westby (Rowan University)

Also, if you happen to be in Boulder, Dinh will be teaching in Naropa University’s 2010 Summer Writing Program, from June 14-20 (the entire program runs through July 11). You can get more information on that program at swpr@naropa.edu.

Next up for Linh Dinh? According to Wikivietlit, of which Dinh is editor, as of May 2009 he was working on a collection titled The Deluge: The New Vietnamese Poetry. We’ll look forward to that.

Check out Linh Dinh's work in issue 13.1 of Fourteen Hills. Buy the issue on Small Press Distribution. Take a sneak peak at one of the poems in the Fourteen Hills archives.

-Leigh Ann D.
Fourteen Hills staff