... stunning, vulnerable.

... a masterclass in the art of looking closely. Pham’s attention is delicate and lucid, cleaving to her subjects like film. Through her prose we see objects not only for what they are, but for what they represent – the emotions and memories they bear.

[Pham's] observations span a lot of ground — night runs on Yale’s campus, a painting course in France, a residency in New Mexico, each place an astute rendering from a definitive voice.

Pop Song begins to read like a beautiful, literary breakup album, each essay operating as its own track. By the time you’ve turned the final pages, you want nothing more than to flip the metaphorical album over, drop the needle, and begin again.

Pop Song reads like the lovechild of Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not in the Mood, essay collections that consider art and love from the perspective of literarily inclined women. Pham’s essays are most successful when she enters a more critical mode and flexes her knowledge of visual art.

Pham’s collection boldly reinterprets the memoir-essay genre by accompanying her stories of love with ekphratic commentary on the visual, aural, and verbal language of intimacy. This oblique, innovative method is the author’s makeshift solution to the problem she poses in the collection of how to write on intimacy. Through this form of ekphrasis, she is able to give texture to surface-level events and feelings, as well as to map out her own unique artistic sensibility.

...provocative.

The instinct to mythologize your desire in this way feels inherent to youth, particularly to people, myself included, who came of age and to writing in the heyday of the first-person industrial complex and Tumblr. So it’s no wonder Pop Song feels almost painfully familiar to me—less like looking in a mirror and more like watching an old video of myself, or maybe rereading an old journal. Pham is familiar with this era because she was there too, as a fellow member in the cult of beautiful suffering, taking pictures of her bruised knees.

Pham’s memoir is about many things—art and relationships, travel and self-awareness. However, while it touches on a variety of compelling subjects, it does so in a jumbled way that sometimes makes for a chaotic read.

Pham is valiantly candid and philosophical about her 'displacement' as the American-born daughter of Vietnamese parents, her eating disorder and sexuality, pain and trauma, and racism public, private, and entangled with misogyny.

In her first full-length work of nonfiction, Pham, an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat, thoughtfully collects a series of essays exploring themes of love, beauty, pain, trauma, art, and identity. Over the course of 11 pieces, Pham writes and rewrites her own story using her most honest memories alongside the lives and works of other artists and writers she admires.

Pham reinvents the memoir in a stirring debut that explores the power of language, art, and love.