dust and conscience

Truong Tran's work seems to me to be part of a literary undertaking that has both sociological and aesthetic implications. Tran is advancing the interrelated questions of narration, historiography, and identity and establishing something new in American culture as well as in American literature. dust and conscience speaks of a cultural position that simultaneously and from the start resists both marginalization and assimilation. The refusal to be displaced or to be incorporated is at the heart of the genre-bending evident in the work--it explains why the writing is, and must be simultaneously prose and poetry, story and lyric.--Lyn Hijinian