Mai-Linh K. Hong, JD, PhD
BOOK
Continental Drift:
Poems
WINNER OF THE 2025 TRIO AWARD
Pre-Order Now
“To survive is to refuse / death, but how / to tell refusal from retreat?” In the 2025 Trio Award winning poetry collection Continental Drift, Mai-Linh Hong honors and explores the geography that made and continues to shape her ancestors’ story, her own story, and the future story of her descendants. From Vietnam to Virginia, California to Thailand, Hong plumbs the fault lines, crosses the oceans, crystallizing moments into meaning. Whether luxuriating in the small joys of nature and of existence, or marveling at the process of geological shift, these artfully crafted poems bring the reader into the complex promises and griefs of migration, navigation, and claiming space in a postcolonial world.
Coming July 1, 2026 from Trio House Press.
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Advance Reviews of Continental Drift
Mai-Linh Hong’s Continental Drift shimmers with joy and sorrow that arrives post-war and post-loss. These expansive poems remind us of the ways that language can transform us, mapping geographies of wonder, startlingly sumptuous and alive in their clarity. How lucky we are to get to celebrate this book. Continental Drift is a marvel—just pure magic.
Cathy Linh Che,
author of Ghost Of
“How, where, and why we drift after displacement is a central concern in Continental Drift, a marvel of a book that gives dignity to the refugee. The mother laughing in Vietnam with her whole body and ‘a forest of aunties,’ Mai-Linh Hong shares spirit with all of them, and as migration is an American concept, she shares it with all of us. ‘We never finish/making refuge,’ she reminds us. This is an urgent, brilliant debut.”
Lee Herrick,
California Poet Laureate
Continental Drift delves into the ruptures of displacement—of culture, of land, of the body. Mai-Linh Hong oscillates between gentle and devastating in a way that mimics the quiet, unstoppable violence of nature. Like loss, like shifting tectonic plates, this book reshapes you—slowly, irrevocably, and down to the bone.
Sierra DeMulder,
Trio Award Final Judge and author of Ephemera
Something breathtaking happens in Mai-Linh Hong’s Continental Drift: the poet pays—no, the poet gives—such lucid attention to her poems and imbues their shifting, scintillating life forms with such precise consciousness, that at a certain point, the reader becomes aware (or I do) that the poems are giving attention back. It is as though the poems are writing the poet. Because of course the earth, in all of its wonder and violence, listens first. Hong's poetry is the record, the evidence, of that: of poetry as proprioception; synchronizing movement and migration; sometimes sacrificial, sometimes seismic, always open and, however painfully, ongoing. “We are drifting / toward a future,” she writes, while also writing, “We never finish / making refuge.”
Brandon Shimoda,
author of The Afterlife Is Letting Go
These poems dance on the page. The choreography is precise, crisp, and committed. Mai-Linh Hong makes our eyes work and richly rewards the work. With an ear both acute and panoramic, she draws geopolitics out of landscapes, mines the discourse between nature, environmental and climate crisis, and human catastrophe. She posits refugees as the human analogue to the unique plant and animal communities that adapt to the estuary mix of fresh and salty water. In their technical range and emotional power, these poems are shifting plate tectonics. Continental Drift is brave, exquisite, resounding work.
Shailja Patel,
author of Migritude
Poems
Poems are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Santa Clara Review.
Delta and Continental Drift [Chesapeake], The Minnesota Review 105
Blue Ridge Elegy, Copper Nickel 42
American Sonnet Upon Finding an Old Report Card and American Sonnet Whenever [Gaza/Afghanistan/Vietnam/etc.] Gets Called a Land of Bombs, The Offing
Winter Visitors (erasure of Thoreau's Walden), The Maine Review 11.2
What we lost may come ashore, Everybody Cousin, and Harvest Moon with Wildfire, Waxwing 34
Field Notes From Aliens Who Float (Poetry Contest Runner-Up), Hayden's Ferry Review 77
to my smallest ancestor, EXODUS AFTER THOUGHTS x Kaya Press
Airport and Third Country Resettlement, ANMLY 40
Plum Jam (Best of the Net Nominee), Crab Orchard Review 26.2
Field Trip, Wildness 37
The Road Where My Grandfather Died, They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets edited by Christine Kitano & Alicia Pyrmohamed
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