Drowning Dragon Slips by Burning Plains counters the narrative held in the West about women and the land of the quaintly lush and charming Mekong Delta. A rice field in the middle of the communist and American-backed government, the delta was an essential resource that fed both sides of the war in Vietnam. The Mekong Delta went through countless massacres on an immense scale. Yet, history wiped the injuries away as if the river forgot. In her debut collection, Khai Don explores the meaning of being a woman in a land robbed of its innocence. Through a collage-like approach of personal history and fables, Khai Don's poems present an insidious flow of recollections that young people do not want to remember and that old people avoid discussing.

In poems that lament and wonder, Khai Don reclaims the narrative for her people by unexpected material yielded from social research, CIA documents, and American military evaluations to erode the dominant narrative about the Delta in and after the war. Her poems tell tales of the old bombs turning into mangoes, rice germinating out of bullet holes, and every woman losing her way home.