![Vietnamese diaspora poet and interdisciplinary artist Winston Lê’s newest chapbook, Tôiblazon, is connected to two languages. Tôi is "I" in Vietnamese, which is his heritage language. And "blazon” is derived from the English word "emblazon". According to Lê, the poems in Tôiblazon “expand and adorn new meanings, sonic resonances and reattuned tongues from their previous iterations”, which appeared in his last chapbook, Thhhhhh. “My repertoire as a bilingual poet explores the space in-between languages—that liminality—particularly between Vietnamese, which is my mother tongue, and English,” Lê tells Pancouver by phone. This makes the KPU creative writing graduate a unique figure within B.C.’s community of poets. He has also creative an asemic writing script, which he calls “alpha/broken”. For those unfamiliar with the term “asemic writing”, it's an open form of marking paper that transcends language barriers. The word “asemic” means there is no specific semantic content. Asemmic writers freely express themselves through visual expression, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions. Lê will lead a workshop on asemic writing at 2 p.m. on Sunday (May 17) at the Vancouver Art Book Fair, which runs all weekend at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre. Entry into the book fair is free and there is a $15 fee to attend the workshop in Roundhouse Amenity Room “C”. “I’ll be giving a lecture on what asemic writing is, and then using trading cards,” Lê explains. “The participants will [make] asemic scripts of their mother tongues or a constructed language they’ve made.” Then in the remaining time, workshop attendees will be able to exchange trading cards with their invented script and discuss what it means with each other. Moreover, Lê plans to discuss this emerging art form with those who stop by his table at the Vancouver Art Book Fair. Tôiblazon is his fourth chapbook. In addition to his poetry, Lê is currently working on a manuscript called To Construe a Frankenlang. In this project, he explores how colonial violence dating back centuries has contributed to the disenfranchisement of the Vietnamese language as identity. Lê is keenly interested in how intruders—ranging from Portuguese, Chinese, French, and Americans—have contributed to the bastardization of Vietnamese script. “There’s kind of a Frankenstein-like mishmash of linguistics,” Lê maintains. In 2018, he published his first chapbook, translanguaging. It was shortlisted for the 2018 Broken Pencil Zine Awards. He defines translanguaging as “existing and speaking between languages”. “It’s sort of like code-switching, but a little different because you’re using it all at once,” Lê states. He credits one of his instructors, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, for inspiring him to assemble his works and think about longer-term forms of poetry. Saklikar also helped him unveil his chapbook at an event called Asians on Edge with other writers of Asian ancestry. “We did a fun little launch celebrating the Asian diaspora in all its forms,” he recalls. AMSSA program coordinator Elaina Hang Nguyen devoted an entire chapter to Lê’s translanguaging in her 2024 master’s thesis in the UBC Faculty of Arts. She pointed out that Lê “uses wordplay and mistranslation to explore the flexibility of multilingual communication through its improperness, as with slippages between mother (mà) and ghost (ma) when the diacritic is removed”. “Amidst the industries of memory that make it difficult to fully mourn the deaths, loss, and displacement that resulted from war, Le’s work imagines how children born from refugee lineages act as vessels through which ghostly memory gets channeled through,” wrote Nguyen. “Contrary then to how war memorials spectacularize deaths, Le shows more intimate ways that these histories are felt by Vietnamese Canadian bodies as part of the ongoing, tentative, and collective work of repairing relations ruptured by war.” Lê’s second chapbook, hybrid utterance, expanded on his examination of translanguaging. “What if you woke up next beside the corpse of your language?” he states the book blurb on his website. “Amidst the liminal postwar between English, Vietnamese, and French, hybrid utterance is a chimerical text that explores heteroglossia as rearticulation, translingual hybridity, and dynamic language-making in the wake of imperial and colonial violences.” The success of other Vietnamese diaspora writers has bolstered Lê’s courage to write about the colonization of his mother tongue. They include Ocean Vuong (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, The Emperor of Gladness) and Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer, To Save and Destroy: Writing as an Other). “They actually opened the gate for me, saying it’s okay to bring identity,” Lê declares. “There are other people doing that kind of work. They gave me permission to do this kind of thing. But I also feel like I’ve been putting my own spin in there as well.” The Vancouver Art Book Fair continues at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre in Yaletown from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday (May 16) and from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday (May 17). Admission is free. Vincent Lê will lead a workshop on asemic writing at 2 p.m. on Sunday in Roundhouse Amenity Room “C”. The workshop fee is $15 and participants can register online through the Vancouver Art Book Fair website. Follow Pancouver on Instagram @PancouverMedia, on X @PancouverMedia, and on Bluesky @pancouver.bsky.social. Winston Lê](https://pancouver.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Author-Photo-4.jpg)
Poet Winston Lê finds his voice through chapbooks, asemic writing, and Frankenlang
Charlie Smith
May 16, 2026
On Sunday (May 17), Lê will lead a workshop on asemic writing at the Vancouver Art Book Fair.
Day: May 16, 2026
Poet Winston Lê finds his voice through chapbooks, asemic writing, and Frankenlang
Charlie Smith
May 16, 2026
The Society of We Are Canadians Too created Pancouver to foster greater appreciation for underrepresented artistic communities. A rising tide of understanding lifts all of us.
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We would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the traditional and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam Indian Band), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish Nation), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh Nation). With this acknowledgement, we thank the Indigenous peoples who still live on and care for this land.
This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada.
The Society of We Are Canadians Too created Pancouver to foster greater appreciation for underrepresented artistic communities. A rising tide of understanding lifts all of us.
We would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the traditional and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. With this acknowledgement, we thank the Indigenous peoples who still live on and care for this land.