MOUTH, SUGAR, AND SMOKE by Eric Tran

ISBN: 9781939728531 ; full-length poetry collection, 6x9" paperback

Cover Artwork: Mazahir @girthofvenus on Instagram

Publication Date: July 1, 2022

Author: Eric Tran

Location: Doha, Qatar and Richmond, Virginia

Distribution: Distributed by Diode Editions

 

Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke howls and hungers. This collection, which won the Diode Editions 2021 Full-Length Book Prize, grieves a lover lost to addiction and also swims in the intoxication of desire. While the poems in Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke portray a yearning for intimacy, they create spaces to experience the duality of pleasure and mourning. Even when Tran writes under formal constraint, like the crown of sonnets, these poems struggle and break and, in doing so, explore queer and transformative ways of wanting and being wanted. 

 

“Wounds, here, are not ornamental. Tenderness, here, is as restless and resilient as pain. The poems refuse transformation, superficial resolutions. Instead, the language—unsparing, striking—attends to addiction and death with grace, awe. The emotional complexity is mirrored structurally: the lines waterfall and halt, a sonnet crown jolts awake the mind, sentences simmer with lyrical momentum. Eric Tran’s second book is heart-rich and deftly written—the poems will stay with you long after you finish reading it.”

 

—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine


"'I resent no one / the instinct to run' writes Eric Tran in his brave and beautiful Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke. But this is a poet who never runs. In fact, he pushes deep into the raw center of desire, admitting 'I’ve wanted your picked-at / scab, your broken voice through a / morning-night call.' This is a book of lust and brokenness, of 'suffering as hot / and clean as a pistol's mouth.' Whether attending an autopsy as part of his profession, or taking care of a friend in a room of '[u]sed needles / like a fist / of Pixy Stix,' this is a speaker who never turns away. This is a poet who brings 'scalpel / baring down onto bone.'"

 

—Aaron Smith, author of The Book of Daniel
 

Eric Tran is a queer Vietnamese poet and the author of Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke (Diode Editions) and The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer (Autumn House Press). He serves as an associate editor for Orison Books and a poetry reader for the Los Angeles Review. He has received awards and recognition from Prairie Schooner, New Delta Review, Best of the Net, and others. His work appears in RHINO, 32 Poems, the Missouri Review and elsewhere. He is a physician completing his fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry in Portland, Oregon.

 

Select Poems from Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke

 

• "Angier, NC." Missouri Review. 2019.

 

• “Call the Mouth.” 32 Poems. Summer 2019.

 

• “10 Responses to a Clickbait Headline.” The Boiler. 2016.

 

• “My Dearest Resident Brian.” Diagram.

 

• “Aubade with Withdrawal” and “Naloxone.” Diode Poetry Journal. 2022

 

• “Scenes (Does He Speak)." Glass Poetry Journal. 2019.

 

• “Frequent Utilizer Protocol.” Hobart. 2021.

 

• “Ode to Bossy Bottoms.” Pleiades. 2020.