Salt & Ashes: Poems From the Abyss

Salt and Ashes is a searing, poetic reckoning with love, loss, rage, and survival. In this devastatingly intimate collection, Thanh Dinh writes through the shattered glass of diaspora, queerness, and feminine grief-fusing memoir, myth, and lyrical philosophy into a gospel for the brokenhearted.

Structured like a symphony-Andante, Romanze, Scherzo, and Finale-each movement carries the reader deeper into a landscape where kindness can kill, memory becomes a wound, and love is both the altar and the knife. These are not quiet poems. These are the prayers of a girl who never got to be a girl. These are the unsent letters, the hallucinations of Ophelia, the last cigarette of a ghost who was once loved.

Haunted by historical violence and personal betrayals, the speaker refuses closure. Instead, she offers clarity through fire-insisting that tenderness can still bloom in ruins, and that longing, though brutal, is still holy.

For readers of Ocean Vuong, Sylvia Plath, Trịnh Công Sơn, and anyone who's ever tried to rebuild themselves from smoke, Salt and Ashes is not just a poetry collection. It's a resurrection.