The popular VietREADS program at the San Jose Library featured dissident poet Nguyen Chi Thien, introducing his new bilingual book Life, Poetry, and Prison--Cuoc Song, Thi Van, va Tu Day published by Allies for Freedom in Palo Alto, California.  (ISBN 0-977-3638-4-1)

Most of the poems were composed in his memory in during twenty-seven years in Communist prisons in North Vietnam.  He was denied paper and pens.  In 1979, during a brief period of release because there were not enough jailers to handle the imprisonment of most of the South Vietnamese officers and civilian officials in post-war Vietnam, the author secretly wrote three hundred of his poems onto a manuscript, which he brought to the British Embassy in Hanoi asking for their publication "in the free world" and for asylum. 

Nguyen Chi Thien was arrested outside the gate of the Embassy (the police were notified by Vietnamese receptionists) and taken to Hoa Lo (the Hanoi Hilton) prison.  He spent the next twelve years mainly fettered in stocks and in solitary darkness, under starvation conditions imposed by the Communist regime since the rise of Ho Chi Minh. 

But the British kept their promise and the manuscript was sent to the School of Oriental Studies in London, who disseminated it to Vietnamese communities in the US and Europe and the BBC in 1980. 

The translations in this new book are among the first made in English, in 1981, as The Will of a Vietnamese, published in New York in 1984 and long out of print.  The translator is  Nguyen Thi.