[1] The book's poems constitute a biography of Nguyen's mother, Nguyễn Anh Diệp, who was a motorist in a stunt troupe composed entirely of women during the fifties and sixties.

In Fence, Nguyen said she wanted the book to have some substantive relationship to archive, both what has been documented and what has been lost, forgotten; she specifically drew heavily upon Saidiya Hartman's scholarship during its writing.

[4][5] In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called the book "ambitious" and lauded Nguyen's use of language in order to simultaneously communicate a biography of her mother and make a broader argument about diaspora.

[7][2][8] Chicago Review observed: "In Nguyen's new volume ... war and motherhood collide again, rippling across each other with startling effects that confirm an ongoing determination to register the back-and-forth diffraction of the political and the domestic.

"[10] diaCRITICS argued that the poetry collection bore similarities to Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and remarked that readers would be nourished "with tales of Diệp’s daring as a young woman and flying motorcycle artist before having left Vietnam.