Salt and Ashes is a searing, poetic reckoning with love, loss, rage, and survival. In this devastatingly intimate collection, Thanh Dinh writes through the shattered glass of diaspora, queerness, and feminine grief-fusing memoir, myth, and lyrical philosophy into a gospel for the brokenhearted.

Structured like a symphony-Andante, Romanze, Scherzo, and Finale-each movement carries the reader deeper into a landscape where kindness can kill, memory becomes a wound, and love is both the altar and the knife. These are not quiet poems. These are the prayers of a girl who never got to be a girl. These are the unsent letters, the hallucinations of Ophelia, the last cigarette of a ghost who was once loved.

Haunted by historical violence and personal betrayals, the speaker refuses closure. Instead, she offers clarity through fire-insisting that tenderness can still bloom in ruins, and that longing, though brutal, is still holy.

For readers of Ocean Vuong, Sylvia Plath, Tr