Salt & Ashes: Poems From the Abyss (Paperback or Softback)

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, Trịnh Công Sơn, and anyone who’s ever tried to rebuild themselves from smoke, Salt and Ashes is not just a poetry collection. It’s a resurrection.

Thanh Dinh is a Vietnamese-Canadian poet and writer. Her work explores grief, diaspora, queerness, political memory, and the sacred violence of survival. Her debut collection, The Smallest God Who Ever Lived, was named a Top New Release on Amazon and praised for its emotional intensity and lyrical boldness. She is the co-founder of Writerly Books, a small press committed to radical, poetic, and diasporic storytelling.Salt and Ashes is her second collection, composed as a symphonic elegy for the dispossessed and the divine.