Sophia Terazawa - a story of Lua Mater, an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century.

 

Sophia Terazawa, Tetra Nova. Deep Vellum, 2025

https://www.sophiaterazawa.com/

Tetra Nova tells the story of Lua Mater, an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century.

The operatic text begins in Saigon, where she meets a little girl named Emi, an American of Vietnamese-Japanese descent visiting her mother’s country for the first time since the war’s end. As the voices of Lua and Emi blend into one dissociated narration, the stories accelerate out of sequence, mapping upon the globe a series of collective memories and traumas passed from one generation to the next.

Darting between the temples of Nagasaki, the mountains of Tucson, and an island refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, Lua and Emi in one embodied memory travel across the English language itself to make sense of a history neither wanted. When a tiny Panda named Panda suddenly arrives, fate intervenes, and the work acts as a larger historical document, unpacking legacies of genocide and the radical modes of resistance that follow.

At the heart of this production lies a postcolonial identity in exile, and the performers must come to terms with who may or may not carry their stories forward: Emi or Lua. Part dreamscape, part investigative poetics, multiple fragmenting identities traverse across time and space, the mythic and the profane, toward an understanding of humanity beyond those temple chamber doors.

In the opening to Sophia Terazawa’s Tetra Nova (Deep Vellum, 2025), an elephant knocks the narrator unconscious. He awakens to a soft skull. Ears on top of his head. The disappearance of his fingers and ankles. All anatomy rearranged. The narrator is a stuffed plush Panda. He falls back asleep, then awakens again: now she’s a human girl. No one warns you about this shape-shifting. Like the body of its stuffed plush narrator Panda, Terazawa’s writing removes the points of articulation in Western storytelling, elevating a joyfully disjointed sensibility in its place. Tetra Nova celebrates the multitude, proving there’s more room for every voice once you break the mold. Terazawa writes:

We might . . . argue against the temple of literature . . . How you choose, dear reader, to survive our story of colonialism and the complete cauterization of our written language, the irony of which is printed before you now, depends entirely on this story of separating everything you might know of grammar, the rules of storytelling itself, family, and national cohesion, with everything you know of yourself.

Tetra Nova is at once playful and devastating, “a manuscript of insurrection” against not only the “temple of literature” but also the erased histories of Vietnamese colonization. You could call Tetra Nova a polyvocal novel, except the voices speak at once, on top of each other, or with the same mouth. Time, place, and person shift from sentence to sentence. Terazawa creates a hybrid manuscript like a game of Tetris, its voices spinning rearrangements, reminiscent of Ende’s The Neverending Story against Diana Khoi Nguyen’s poetry against Marguerite Duras. To read Tetra Nova is to lean into nonlinear disorientation, flipping pages back and forth across time, scribbling in the margins of Vietnamese history. At times the process is frustrating. Your brain wants to bang the narrative into a linear shape and compartmentalize the voices speaking. Terazawa’s project trains you to resist and separate yourself from Western narration. When Tetra Nova breaks the fourth wall, the manuscript implicates you in its unfolding story, asking: How will you read? To find a familiar narrative? Or to rewrite history?

In 1995 Bến Thành Market, young Emi follows her Vietnamese mother. Chrysanthemum, and her Japanese father through its bazaar. Children play tag. A group of teenagers sings to new wave on a portable speaker. An elderly woman at a market stall offers Emi a toy horse. “You know me,” says the woman. The surrounding world sighs dreamlike. Even though the old woman’s mouth remains motionless, young Emi senses a chorus speaking behind her leathered face. The voices reveal a strange secret: Emi’s father found her as a baby, tucked inside a straw basket, surrounded by tanuki-raccoons dancing a divine ritual. Emi was “sent from somewhere else.” Then the boundary between the old woman and child dissipates, and Emi suddenly knows, “I was the old woman. My name was Lua.” Years later Emi’s son Tony reads this interaction in his mother’s writings. Now institutionalized, Emi is a poet with unfinished notebooks on her own mother and the history of Việt Nam. Tetra Nova is the anthology of Emi’s four notebooks, each titled after the four elements, and a multi-genre assemblage of photography, prose poetry, and endnotes. Like the woman from the market, Tony reads a host of voices speaking through Emi’s mouth: Chrysanthemum herself. The stuffed plush panda, appropriately named Panda. And a lesser-known Roman deity, known as Lua Mater. As Tony edits Emi’s writings, he hopes to rearrange her notes into a logical story and reorganize her sanity as well. Except her story grows dizzy as its chorus reclaims history and unshackles itself entirely from Western narrative structure.

Tetra Nova is Terazawa’s third full-length book after her collection of love poems, Anon, her debut collection Winter Phoenix, and her award-winning chapbooks, I Am Not a War and Correspondent Medley. With Tetra Nova, Terazawa returns to thinking about Vietnamese colonization, weaving pop culture and myth alongside ancestral history. Captain America meets shadow puppetry. Jigglypuff and high priestesses merge into one. Her characters dislodge well-known stories, putting themselves on the cast. When Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997) rolls, Panda stars right alongside Milla Jovovich. To describe Terazawa’s manuscript threatens to confuse her project by imposing Western logic on its structure. But Tetra Nova spears Western reason at the source, inviting a Roman goddess onto its cast. Lua crash-lands on Earth after her former husband, the planet Paul, slingshots her out of orbit. (She emphasizes former.) Lua’s presence presumes the promise of logic, as the other characters beseech her, “We find ourselves waiting for you, Lua, the record cosmic-keeper of steel and fire, so help us. Emi can’t render this production into one coherent draft. Our setting, the dates, and plot points switch all over the place.” True, time not only jumps, but folds, so that “[t]he year is 1963, 1975, or 1973, interchangeably.” And Emi looks for the lead voice, worrying, “Among your voices, I could / sense no center voice. It / dizzied me.” How do you make sense of a story when its plot, its time, its setting, and its characters keep moving? Terazawa shifts the center of the universe, deflating individualism. Yes, the firey Planet Paul, that former husband, proves hot with his “burning core of hydrogen, rock, and magma.” But when Lua stops revolving around him, much to his fury, he paces outside her house as Kate Bush blares from inside its walls. Tetra Nova decenters an arrogant sun for a collective of stars, all blinking their histories in simultaneous time. And anyway, why listen to a Paul when you have a Panda?

The beating heart of Tetra Nova relies on legitimizing its own telling, against what the West might diagnose as regression or dissociation. Emi’s medical staff say, “I like her stories. I don’t know why, but I do. . . . But when I listen to Emi in the courtyard, even when she’s turning them all around, I never know who exactly speaks, but I don’t pause to ask what makes sense or not.” Tony’s project to edit Emi’s work and restore her sanity is a failed one, but only insomuch as linearity or individual lucidity defines healing. If anything, Tetra Nova criticizes the asylum of both nation and psychiatry, privileging, rather than pathologizing the presence of collective voices. When Terazawa passes the microphone to minor Roman goddesses and stuffed plush toys, she opens the floor to deeply powerful storytelling. She writes, “How do we recreate our truth to access a different truth, the multiplication of a body and distance through genocide, betrayal, and martyrdom”? To read Tetra Nova is to read Tony editing his mother who writes her mother, chasing ancestry. But if Chrysanthemum is Vietnamese, Emi’s father is Japanese: colonized and colonizer. Emi says, Tony writes, “I’m a traitor for writing this; prone to the violence of myself, against myself.” Like the elderly woman in Bến Thành Market, Terazawa ventriloquizes a host of overlapping characters as an author—even you, the reader. And look: her mouth never moves at all.

If Tetra Nova criticizes individualism for collective storytelling, neither is this binary solid. In a 2025 craft lecture on mistranslation, Terazawa writes: “In Saigon, I’m . . . shaken by a similar motion sickness of speech. No public figure has said a word about Palestine here, not in the airports, not on the state television, not in the karaoke machines sprawled on concrete across the city’s centers, not even in the villages, where my cousins continue to dutifully plant joss sticks on unmarked graves. Genocide has become a marker of ongoing consciousness on Vietnamese soil, but one line splits between the silences of then and the silences of today.” Silencing persists, ostensibly everywhere, whether through erasure or revision. Terazawa writes, “Language perhaps conceals further harm. We hold vigil for those taken by the state. But which state?”

Terazawa deploys the hybrid form to restore unseen stories, stealing techniques from the state, encoding and erasing toward new ends. Tetra Nova plays bait and switch when you read, “For example, when you come upon the phrase, ‘unannounced, the feces,’ think about the gun once held against your mother’s head, also, her brother’s head.” Then you read “unannounced, the feces,” and you understand what has gone unsaid. When Panda stands in for the memory of a baby, held tight against Chrysanthemum’s chest, the toy heightens the devastation to follow. “Soon, in every story, the mother who looks like my mother will act out a choice, in her memory, no one should be ever forced to make, but here they do.” Every switch creates a bridge for communication, rather than its demolishing. The physical text in Tetra Nova lightens almost imperceptibly as its refugees flee Việt Nam, its clarity degrading until the words blur almost invisible. The fading creates an ache in literal and historical erasure, then acute loss when a few words scream black again: “the Vietnamese-American filmmaker Tiana Alexandra speaks / ‘Before,’ / ‘when I told you the story . . .’ / ‘in front of my eyes,’ / ‘I see no one.’” Tetra Nova is all the more devastating for this willingness to play. (For example, when you come upon the phrase “insurrection,” think revolution.) When Terazawa writes the grand insurrection in 1945 during the August Revolution, less than a month before Việt Nam declared independence from its colonizers, its people mirror Tetra Nova’s cast.

It always starts like this, at the rally. A man becomes his singular witness to the present moment of a war declared by his father’s people. He conjures up a sensation of Now, Now, Now, gasping from each filament of scenes before a world that does nothing, and even that which multiplies to ten, and if not so, hundreds and hundreds of testimonies splattered across time, moving collectively forward, a tide of angry, famished men as they march collectively onward, and, arriving at last to the front doorsteps of a grand opera house in northern Vietnam, these men go completely silent.

If revolution always starts like this, with many voices moving forward as a collective, Terazawa’s polyvocal book signals a grand beginning. Tetra Nova not only lights a path to reclaim lost histories but how to push onward in an uncertain present, now, now, now. - Erin Vachon

https://therumpus.net/2025/03/11/sophia-terazawa/

Sophia Terazawa, Anon. Deep Vellum, 2023

A collection of love poems addressed to an adverb, Anon meditates on the temporal “at once” between desire and language.

From the playful verses of Slovenia's Tomaž Šalamun to the brushstrokes of an Edo period painting, Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon by Japan's Ito Jakuchu, a character for the displaced Beloved emerges in this tapestry of time and art across borders.

In Anon, the Beloved reflects: How might translating a human experience, from one language to the next, be an act of longing for the anonymous Other? Or how might this longing for beauty, and the wordless face, heal us both? How might Eros, in exile, respond? With these questions, Vietnam's Mekong delta becomes the book's central force. Endangered gibbons swing from the ruins of ecocide, and each image―rose, ape, and river―weaves itself into an undercurrent of postcolonial time.

In her sensuous second collection, Terazawa (Winter Phoenix) addresses a series of love poems to the adverb anon across four lyrical sections that meditate on themes of romance, colonialism, violence, and loss. The opening poem, “Stay,” begins: “For the muse could not/ light another city// with her eyes, you spoke/ anon, oil black like mine,// and whoever crossed/ that cobbler’s// bridge in Ljubljana/ would also speak of roots.” “Walk with me, anon,” she writes, taking this unnamed addressee to a garden “[o]vergrown with books” through “each decade of grief.” These deeply felt poems are filled with images of gibbons, rivers, and roses. Indeed, the speaker writes, “We could have dreamed of roses.” With haunting imagery, Terazawa describes a world where one’s “present tense arrived misshapen” in settings ravaged by war or climate change. “Kids are dying,// in your country and my country, too,” she proclaims. These poems tackle the challenges and atrocities of the present with an eye to the past and an insistence on beauty. Terazawa’s lush imagination gorgeously renders the interconnectedness of a difficult world. - Publishers Weekly

Sophia Terazawa, Winter Phoenix: Testimonies

in Verse. Deep Vellum, 2021

A book of testimonies in verse, Winter Phoenix is a collection of poems written loosely after the form of an international war crimes tribunal. The poet, a daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, navigates the epigenetics of trauma passed down, and across, the archives of war, dislocation, and witness, as she repeatedly asks, “Why did you just stand there and say nothing?” Here, the space of accusation becomes both lyric and machine, an “investigation" which takes place in the margins of martial law, the source material being soldiers’ testimonies given during three internationally publicized events, in this order―The Incident on Hill 192 (1966, Phù Mỹ District, Vietnam); The Winter Soldier Investigation (1971, Detroit, USA); and The Russell Tribunal (1966, Stockholm, Sweden; 1967, Roskilde, Denmark). Ultimately, however, Winter Phoenix is a document of resilience. Language decays. A ceremony eclipses its trial, and the radical possibilities of a single scream rises from annihilation.

"In her debut, Terazawa, daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, considers the colonial and linguistic legacy of the Vietnam war in a work comprising imagined testimonies in verse." —Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly

"What language can we use to describe atrocities mounting on top of atrocities? How do we organize the telling? What happens after? In Sophia Terazawa’s stunning and necessary debut collection of poetry, we begin with the letter A, we begin in Vietnam. We climb a hill. On our journey we encounter different systems and schema for representing the moment of slaughter' (the affidavit, the cross examination, the grease work and its diagrams, the Pleiades, the Q and A). But we do not progress as much as watch events disperse like light through a prism. 'Therefore, we direct that length of earth through weed then bone, using this meter of our killers…' writes Terazawa. 'Yes, we thus decompose to open gaps for breath…' Terazawa splinters, she reconstitutes, we witness the burn, the rise. There’s a limit to what can happen in a colonial language. In Winter Phoenix, Terazawa takes us beyond it" ―Susan Briante

"I envy you, who are about to experience Sophia Terazawa’s Winter Phoenix, for the jagged, life-harrowing testimony / the searing counter-autopsy performed on the overspreading shadows of human extremity / and the enforced contortions and yet finally free revelations of language / that are about to incite and irrevocably transform your mind and especially your heart. Terazawa’s poetry―trial, exhibition, demonstration, transfiguration, ballad of descendant unquiet―is the hardest won form of love. It is poetry as refoliation." ―Brandon Shimoda

"Violence looks back, tries to find quiet in its wake, but quiet chooses instead to slip away to a place Elias Khoury called Little Mountain. Toni Morrison took us to the clearing. Paul Celan followed ashes into the sky. Like them, Sophia Terazawa leans closer to the page, to its ink, deeper into the chest and throat, closer to the edges of her fingertips, so she can lift quiet into the imagination and thereby inaugurate a courtroom for reckoning, a chamber for transformation, a hill for a tattered flag, and a hill again, to run down, arms open, holding out an amulet of love."―Farid Matuk

"Sophia Terazawa’s profound debut collection Winter Phoenix invites us to seek out radical healing rituals as a means to persevere amidst the horrors of empire during the Vietnam War. Beneath its testimonies, exhibits, cross-examinations, and diagrams of war crime tribunals is the incantation of voices that can no longer remain unheard. The poet honors these voices that span 'between documents and justice,' along with the ancestral and astral, toward greater possibilities of repair. By conjuring an inquiry of these crimes, by subverting language of the empire, and by seeking new accountability, the reader is compelled to not look away but then to ask: where does complicity end and healing begin? This collection guides us to listen deeper and encourages us to consider who speaks and is allowed to speak, who jurors the justice and receives the justice, who can and cannot answer the questions to make us whole. In its refusal to 'Learn to / spēk / just how this / ˈkəntrē / speaks,' we are pushed further so that within these pages transformation becomes all the more possible."―Anthony Cody

"With Winter Phoenix, Sophia Terazawa conducts a symphony of voices, documents, and archives in the form of lyric testimonies which bring to mind precedent texts such as Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, Layli Long Soldier's Whereas, and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! Incisive and microscopic, Terazawa examines the intimacies of the unnamed speaker's matrilineal line while cross-examining those who were complicit in war crimes during the Resistance War Against America, or American War, or the 'Vietnam War' (as it is referred to outside of Vietnam). Lush ecological textures and '[h]ills of lemongrass and eucalyptus' juxtapose against lyric redactions and source materials: 'Well, I've shot deer and I've gutted deer. It was just like when you stick a deer with a knife--sort of a thud--or something like this, sir,' culminating in searing treatise against and indictment of war. Terazawa is exacting in her visions of the personal and trans-national past. 'These facts are very simple,' she writes, and she's absolutely right--but the aftermath, the legacy--is far from it."―Diana Khoi Nguyen