Linh Dinh

He has suggested that “in every field besides sports, entertainment and politics, blacks are failing spectacularly against all other races,” writing that “during segregation, blacks [...] were self-sufficient, because they had to be. With integration, blacks can take their money to superior, non-black businesses, and that’s why you see almost no black businesses any more, not even in the blackest neighborhoods.” “Black hip hop [leads] the decay” of the American mind, he writes, saying “much of this has been accomplished under the stewardship of Jewish impresarios.”

He is a Holocaust denier, writing that “the elaborate Holocaust myth... [is] propped up by a shoahload of bogus scholarship and tear jerking movies,” and has expressed suspicion that the 2018 shootings at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue were similarly fictitious, saying “The always reliable US media announced that 11 Jews were killed in Pittsburgh, although there’s not a single pixel of visual evidence[...]so the cat must have instantly covered all the corpses with dirt and lapped up every drop of blood.” He has suggested that Donald Trump is an agent of the deep state and that “to better serve Jews, Trump is willing to appear as their piñata.”

He was a visiting faculty member at University of Pennsylvania. From 2015–2016, Dinh was the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.

The second effort in verse from this rising star of the small-press world turns his considerable powers to the depiction of acrid ironies, unmitigated disgust and politically charged gall. One of its opening poems imagines the poet as a half-knight, half-corpse "Cadavalier," exclaiming, "This pinkish universe is really nothing/ But a flocculation of my desires." A fast-moving poem called "Pick-Up Lines"—one of many about sexual discomfort—instructs a lover to "listen to my effluvium." Dinh (All Around What Empties Out) often imitates (or perhaps quotes) subliterary material: online personal ads, instant messaging, brochures and corporatespeak ("We've entered a new level of parking consciousness"), confessions of X-rated adventures by semi-literate writers. His swift lines also portray the kind of grotesque caricature ("The day before her abortion,/ The one-eyed lady accidentally swallowed her glass eye") used manipulatively in politics. Exploring disgust while toying with frames and assumptions, the poet becomes in one sense a real heir to Charles Bukowski; in another, he joins other younger poets (such as Drew Gardner and K. Silem Mohammad) in a movement toward hard-edged, provocative parody. It might be hard to call Dinh's volume pleasing, but readers of a certain temperament may well find it irresistible.

He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House and Blood and Soap, and five books of poems: All Around What Empties Out, American Tatts, Borderless Bodies, Jam Alerts, and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy. His first novel, Love Like Hate, was published in October 2010 and won the Balcones Fiction Prize.

In 2005, he was a David Wong fellow at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. He spent 2002–2003 in Italy as a guest of the International Parliament of Writers and the town of Certaldo.

His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, The Best American Poetry 2007, and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present. The Village Voice picked his Blood and Soap as one of the best books of 2004. Translated into Italian by Giovanni Giri, it is published in Italy as Elvis Phong è Morto.

He was a 1993 Pew Fellow. He writes a column for The Unz Review.

Dinh came to the US in 1975, lived in Philadelphia and in 2018 is moving back to Vietnam.

Linh Dinh (Vietnamese Đinh Linh, born 1963, Saigon, Vietnam) is a Vietnamese-American poet, fiction writer, translator, and photographer.