Written by: Vlai Ly
Paperback, 90 pages, 6x9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64410-050-9
Upon Inheriting the Opium Dream dives into the heart of the Hmong American experience, illuminating how shamanism, community, and the influence of drugs and alcohol have shaped the way a people navigate a violent past that continues to haunt them.
In these poems, cultural memories are wielded to make sense of displacement and the wounds of the Secret War, wounds numbed but not erased by substance abuse passed down through generations in the face of devastating loss.
The opium dream serves as a metaphor for this inherited state: a place of limbo between pain and joy, between deeply rooted cultural practices and the debilitating weight of history. These poems reveal how cultural memory can be both a haunting burden and a vital tether to identity.
Ultimately, Upon Inheriting the Opium Dream is an intimate and powerful testament to the enduring spirit of the Hmong people. It is a journey through the challenges of carrying a fragmented cultural memory, where the search for home, identity, and healing is fought daily against the backdrop of historical trauma and its tangible, intoxicating, legacy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Vlai Ly is a second-generation Hmong American poet from Springfield, Massachusetts. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts with his BA in English. He is the co-founder and editor at Maivmai, an online journal for Hmong American writers. He is a member of the Hmong American Writer’s Circle. His writing has been published in Txhawb Magazine, Light Work Annual, Kawm, News Review, and Global Asia - University of Wisconsin Madison. In 2023, Vlai’s poetry work was the runner-up to the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize and a finalist to the Colorado Prize for Poetry.