“I am a seed / Of the tree of knowledge,” begins Soul Vang’s poem “Song of the Cluster Bomblet.” Of his choice in writing a poem in the voice of a bomb, Vang says, “Everyone and everything has a story. Some can tell their stories, some can’t. I imagined what story a bomblet would tell if it could.”
This month, for our second installment of our four-part series Writing from the Absence: Voices of Hmong American Poets, curated by 2016 Walt Whitman winner Mai Der Vang, we present Soul Vang and his new poem “Song of the Cluster Bomblet,” as well as an interview between Soul Vang and Mai Der Vang about Soul’s poem.