To Live Here
by Soul Vang
ISBN: 978-0-9897395-2-8
Imaginary Friend Press is proud to release Soul Vang's first full length collection of poems To Live Here. Vang's book was selected for the 2014 reading period, and IFP is so proud to have given home to such a stunning book.
To Live Here was one of hundreds of books we received, but Vang's narrative grit and delicate lyricism detailing an experience we hadn't considered pushed this book to the top of our 'must read again and again' pile.
Here is some praise for Vang's accomplishment:
In To Live Here, Soul Vang has given us a meditation on identity and place, history's conversation within our daily lives, from the Dragon River to the San Joaquin Valley in California, from childhood to fatherhood, from the war in the mountains of youth to service in uniform during the Cold War in Germany. Soul Vang has given us a deeply human book, one that teaches me more about the place I call home, too. In turn, Vang's poems teach us more about the world we live in, the places we call home.
- Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country and Here, Bullet
To Live Here is a compilation of emotions and stories gathered by a man in love with poetry. Every poem is an expression of his sensitivity to the form; every story is a testament to the strength of memory in remembering feelings and faces in a life full of departure. This is one more addition to the document of the Hmong American experience. Soul Vang has captured the essence of his truth on this road to being Hmong in the world.
- Kao Kalia Yang, author of The Late Homecomer
