Finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Poetry
Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke howls and hungers. This collection, which won the Diode Editions’ 2021 Full-Length Book Prize, grieves a lover lost to addiction and also swims in the intoxication of desire. While the poems in Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke portray a yearning for intimacy, they create spaces to experience the duality of pleasure and mourning. Even when Tran writes under formal constraint, like the crown of sonnets, these poems struggle and break and, in doing so, explore queer and transformative ways of wanting and being wanted.
Diode Editions 2022
Winner of the 2019 Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize
In The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, Eric Tran contends with the aftermath of a close friend’s suicide while he simultaneously explores the complexities of being a gay man of color. At the intersection of queerness, loss, and desire, Tran uses current events, such as the Pulse nightclub tragedy, pop culture references, and comic book allusions to create a unique and textured poetry debut. He employs an unexpected pairing of prayer and fantasy allowing readers to imagine a world of queer joy and explore how grief can feel otherworldly.
Autumn House Press 2020
Featured in the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Featured in the Asian American Journalists Association Book Club
"Eric Tran's Revisions revises more than words. These poems, with their restless forms and lexicons, needle themselves through the psyche; they suture and sear, harboring speakers of myriad aftermaths. True to a physician's gaze, these poems, in their unflinching obsession with the renewal and failure of bodies, both tender and visceral at once, plant Eric Tran firmly in the long tradition of healer-wordsmiths, right alongside William Carlos Williams, Fady Joudah, and Rafael Campo. I love these poems. They teach me that revision, if nothing else, is a way to stave off forgetting, is a second chance. As such, how lucky we are to read Tran's poems this early in what will soon be an unforgettable body of work."
- Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Sibling Rivalry Press 2018