"Facing It" is Komunyakaa's response to visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., nearly 14 years after his return home from the front. The poem was published in his 1988 poetry collection Dien Cai Dau. This prize-winning collection was Komunyakaa's first that depicted his experiences in Vietnam and the brutality he faced during the war. "Facing It" is perhaps Komunyakaa’s best-known work and has been included in other popular collections, including Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (2001). The poem flows between the public and the personal, as the speaker confronts his traumatic memories while looking at his reflection and the names of those who did not survive in...
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