In the realm of history, Susan Tichy’s Bone Pagoda takes its title from an ossuary on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border, where the bones of 3000 massacre victims are preserved. In the realm of meaning, it honors the first and final location of every war: the body. These poems are a personal journey through “Vietnam”—the country, the war, and the moral catastrophe signified by this word in American memory.



In the early 1980s, married Michael O’Hanlon, a Vietnam combat veteran

Despite all else that happened in our lives, the war never really went away. Michael first returned to Vietnam in 1998; in 2000, he and I spent a month traveling there. In the northwest mountains, near China, he climbed Fan Si Pan, the tallest peak in Southeast Asia, while I took easier treks through farms and villages surrounding the town of Sapa. In the south, we traveled mostly by motorized sampan, with a boatman and interpreter, visiting rivers, canals, and towns where Micheal had fought with the Navy’s River Assault Force in 1968 and 69. On return, I began rereading memoirs and histories of the war, on both sides, and of resistance to the war. I reread every issue of The Quicksilver Times, as well as my own diaries of the 1960s and 70s. When I Googled The Quicksilver Times I discovered that one of the staff members, whom I had dated for a while when I was 17, was later unmasked as a CIA spy, sent to the QT to uncover vast sums of Chinese money the White House believed was funding the paper. (Alas, there was none.) In Fall of 2001 I was in Virginia, teaching, and had just begun work on Bone Pagoda’s first poems when the WTC was attacked. I wrote the first draft of perhaps half the book in the months of insomnia that followed, through the bombing of Afghanistan and the anthrax attacks. I finished that draft the following summer, in Scotland. In between, Michael and I had traveled to Montana, then across the whole southern U.S., visiting the graves of young men killed in the River Assault Force. Within a month of my return from Scotland, Michael fell to his death while descending a mountain peak near our home in Colorado.