No better way to say it than the publisher:
Clean, dirty, transformed—Kevin Minh Allen’s Go In Clean, Come Out Dirty puts a magnifying glass on what seems to be mere minutiae, elevating the smallness of details that build up into larger territories of home, belonging, and liminality. Allen paints pastoral landscapes in the U.S. and in Viet Nam on a canvas of clay, grass, trees, wind, roots, hilltops, and holes. The scenes frame a dual and fragmented identity for the Amerasian adoptee poet, who breathes urgency into the transience and legacy of war and resettlement. Allen brings the reader into the bellies of bomb craters and the mouths of rivers East and West. Grouped into three parts, the poems reveal the expectations and realities underneath the fossils of memory and mystery.
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