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.
