100 Words – Poems

Written as a conversation, 100 Words is an exchange of ideas, dialogues, burdens, and ideals between someone White and someone Brown. Two poets, Damon Potter and Truong Tran, write to each other about one hundred powerful words—like “proximity, “shame,” and “hope”—each of which is an abstraction rife with socially inscribed beliefs and denials. They turn to each other in an exchange, a negotiation, and a series of discoveries as they write of their individual histories, share their burdens, and learn to carry weight together.​Tran explains this project, saying “it is occurring to me even as I am writing this now that this is not an experiment, or case study or collaboration or partnership. Damon is not the subject nor am I. This is a shared endeavor, a lived experience between two very different lives trying to understand what it means to be, to see the other.”