Contemporary Authors

• As Long as Trees Last Wave Books (Seattle, WA), 2012
• Violet Energy Ingots Wave Books (Seattle, WA), 2016

1. Violet energy ingots LCCN 2015043385 Type of material Book Personal name Nguyen, Hoa, 1967- author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Violet energy ingots / Hoa Nguyen. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced Seattle : Wave Books, [2016] Description 85 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781940696355 (limited edition hardcover) 9781940696348 (trade pbk.) CALL NUMBER PS3614.G88 A6 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. As long as trees last LCCN 2011049618 Type of material Book Personal name Nguyen, Hoa, 1967- Main title As long as trees last / Hoa Nguyen. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created Seattle, Wash. : Wave Books : Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, c2012. Description 69 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9781933517612 (alk. paper) Shelf Location FLS2013 005633 CALL NUMBER PS3614.G88 L66 2012 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1)

• Hecate Lochia - 2009 Hot Whiskey Press, Berlin, Germany
• Your Ancient See Through - 2002 Subpress, Burton, MI

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoa_Nguyen

  Hoa Nguyen
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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  Hoa Nguyen in 2006.
  Hoa Nguyen (born 1967 in Vĩnh Long) is an American poet.

  Born near Saigon, Hoa Nguyen grew up in the Washington D.C. area and studied poetry at New College of California in San Francisco. She now lives in Toronto, Ontario.[1]

  With her husband Dale Smith, Nguyen edited ten issues of Skanky Possum Magazine, and under this imprint, published books and chapbooks by Kristin Prevallet, Tom Clark, Frank O'Hara, and others.[2] Together they host a reading series presenting performances by Pierre Joris, Linh Dinh, Susan Briante, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Kate Greenstreet, Laynie Browne, Anselm Berrigan, and others. Since 1998, she has led a popular virtual and in-person writing workshop focusing on the works of poets such as Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, Charles Olson, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein.[2] She currently teaches poetics at Ryerson University in Toronto, Miami's low residency MFA program, and the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College.[2]

  Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sound: The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose (City Lights, 2009), The Best of Fence (Fence Books, 2009), For the Time Being: A Bootstrap Anthology (Bootstrap Books, 2008), and in An Anthology of New (American) Poets, Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008) (Talisman House, 1998). She is the author of Dark (1998), Parrot Drum (Leroy, 2000), Your Ancient See Through (Sub Press, 2002) and Red Juice (Effing, 2005), Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey Press, 2009), as well as many online publications. Nguyen is frequently asked to give readings, act as poet in residence, and lecture on poetry for organizations across the country.[2]

  An example of her more notable work is MEAN SUDDENLY BITCH WOMAN, sampled here in an interview with poet Carol Mirakove, praised for its subtle attack on man's virtue in a soulless society.

  Her most recent full-length collection, As Long As Trees Last, was published by Wave Books in September, 2012.

  Bibliography[edit]
  Full-length Collections

  Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books, 2016) (shortlisted for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize)
  As Long As Trees Last (Wave Books, 2012)
  Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey Press, 2009)
  Your Ancient See Through (Subpress, 2002)
  Chapbooks and Booklets

  Tells of the Crackling (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015)
  Late in the Month (Country Valley Press, 2011)
  Chinaberry (Fact-Simile, 2010)
  Kiss a Bomb Tattoo (Effing Press, 2009)
  What Have You (Longhouse Poetry, 2008)
  Poems (Dos Press Chaps, 2007)
  Six Poems (Tolling Elves, 2005)
  Red Juice (Effing Press, 2005)
  Add Some Blue (Backwoods Broadsides Chaplet Series, 2004)
  Let's Eat Red for Fun (Booglet, 2000)
  Parrot Drum (Leroy Press, 2000)
  Dark (Mike and Dale's Press, 1998)

• Bookslut - http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_01_012155.php

  JANUARY 2008

  JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON
  FEATURES

  AN INTERVIEW WITH HOA NGUYEN

  Hoa Nguyen is one of America's best contemporary poets that you may not have heard of. Her first full-length collection, Your Ancient See Through, was released by Subpress in 2002 and it's full of disarming little poems: on the one hand, at home with the wacky and large leaps; on the other hand, in search of mystery, gravity, and beauty all at once. Like my favorite contemporary writers, she dislodges the domestic from its normative articulations. Instead of "elevating the everyday into the transcendental," Hoa Nguyen's poems probe dailiness to divorce us from our base assumptions about how language might present the world to us. Her poems are also funny, and they strangely develop their own language games which comprise some of the most inviting lyrics I've found in a living poet. Here is the first stanza from Your Ancient See Through’s title poem:

  You have your ancient see through
  ways Stars sustain their axis
  Orion listing like gallows
  for my creepy life the pieces
  of our ascending selves

  And here are the final four stanza's of "SHRED":

  birds collect where they will
  telephone wire. the front stoop.

  what days aren't pinched by absence

  we are here
  in our skin. destiny

  is a small city
  I could die today.

  Featured in An Anthology of (New) American Poets (Talisman House, 1998), she is also the author of several chapbooks: most recently Poems (Dos Press, 2007) and Parrot Drum (Leon Works, 2000). With Dale Smith, she edits Skanky Possum, and has lived in Austin, Texas for the last 11 years. Born outside Saigon in 1967, she was raised in Washington D.C. I first discovered Hoa Nguyen through the poems in her chapbook Red Juice (Effing Press, 2005 -- about to go into its third printing); Hot Whiskey will release her second book later this year, which is the occasion of this interview, conducted over e-mail from July through December 2007.
  I understand you're completing a new book now: what's your process for arrangement? How many years have you worked on these poems? Is there a title yet?

  I'm assembling a new full length book for Hot Whiskey press. I tend toward the singular poem. That is, I'm a pretty poem-y poet and do not work toward sustained projects, as such. So I probably do the typical thing and print out all the poems and sit and sift through the pieces trying to find a poem to introduce the work, construct some kind of flow, involve the temporal in some way. I've been writing towards this manuscript for awhile. If it includes poems that appeared in the chapbook Red Juice, then it will collect poems from 2003 until the present. I don't have a working title. I actually feel like I haven't finished writing the poems.

  Is this the same process as with Your Ancient See Through?

  Yes, same process. I can be pretty ruthless towards the poems. In high school I remember my art teacher saying "Art is about making decisions." That has stuck with me. I watch my students agonize over poems, trying different layouts, working and reworking. I could never do that. I can usually tell if a poem is something. There is a certain liveliness about it. If not, I pronounce the poem dead and move on to the next one.

  Do you think you'd be gathering these up in the same way if the Hot Whiskey editors hadn't asked for a book?

  Probably not, which is typical. I don't care about the publishing part of poetry -- the biz part of poetry. I end up in little mags anyway but only because editors prompt me to send them things. Sometimes this means I get into poetry debt, meaning I have to write more poems. I'm actually in poetry debt right now. My life is really really full and I have a tiny window for concentration on poetry (two hours for reading and writing a week).

  I’m interested in your “ruthlessness” towards your own work, especially because of the wackiness that some of your poems utilize; from Your Ancient See Through, lines like “I wish I had Candy Land Pants” or “all the pissy things” or even “no rain all month / now rain washing your shitty car.” What sparks the poem for you? In reflection, can you say how you usually know “if a poem is something”?

  I don't dispense with the wacky! I like humor in poems, except when it's all just smart assery.

  If you look at a line like "I wish I had Candy Land pants" -- there's a lot of texture there. There's the sonic (all the repeated "an" sounds), referential (the US childhood board game Candy Land as well as the colloquial expression "candy pants") and there's image and whimsy.

  My friend the painter Philip Trussell (he did the drawings in Your Ancient See Through) had this to say about these works -- and he says it much better than I could, although perhaps he makes more the works than they are:

  Her poems move in a homeostasis as organisms do, self regulating by feeling, free to ascend and plummet, turn and stand. They put me in mind of Olson's penetration from Quantity in Verse and Shakespeare's Late Plays:

  'They are free to move, come and go, hover as they please, like aerodynes'
  (This is a poor approximation from memory -- I can't find his book this morning)
  The individual words are luminous with 'cellness,' seeming each to know the others, and having a way of being the whole while holding to their own grasp of place. Syntactically alarming and alerting to fresh perception, these poems set thought to new leaps, brightly. The element of Chinese characters and Mayan hieroglyphs dance concretely at these speeds.

  I think I assess the "liveliness" of a poem by feel and intuition more than anything else. Looking toward a kind of energetics. If it's not there, it feels flat and I know it is not a something.

  My poems are different since the Your Ancient See Through ones though; they have a different relationship to narrative now. But the sparks are the same. Usually written in response to reading poetry (I spent 2006 rereading Olson's Maximus and 2007 reading Notley's Alma -- much of this out loud). I also arm myself with materials such as Time magazine, a volume of a 1916 encyclopedia, and advertising circulars. I use dream material, random lists, meals, overheard snippets etc. I do this during that two hour window I spoke of earlier, a private workshop that I've conducted for years. I think I draw energy from the material we just covered -- a reverb still hanging in the air from the poems we read out loud -- and also from the mutual writing-energy of each other -- as well as a sense of urgency to produce in a small frame of time.

  There's so much in your last answer that makes me want to return to your poems. Let's start with the longer poems: What draws you to Notley and Olson's two big books? Can we ever expect a 350-page poem from you?

  I'm drawn to Olson and Notley because they pay attention to the energy of speech, to the turns of syntax, and the rhetorical happenings of a poem or poems. I'm interested in the perspectives they explore and how the poems work in a public sphere. I'm particularly drawn to Notley because of her feminist concerns.

  Will I write an epic? Probably not but you never know.

  How did Phillip Troussel come to do drawings for Your Ancient See Through? And do you think you'll include drawings from him or anyone else in your new book? Do you do much collaboration with visual artists?

  We were introduced to Philip by Ed Dorn. When he learned that we were moving to Austin, Ed gave Dale Smith (a poet, critic and my partner) a contact name for a poet here, John Herndon. We hadn't called John yet, even though we had been here for a year; it was just one of those things. Then one morning Dorn called Dale -- and this was when Ed was very ill -- and asked had he called John yet? Which was such an act of generosity, really.

  John introduced us to Peggy Kelly, a poet who had studied with Robin Blaser. Peggy introduced us to Philip as well as her partner the painter RJ Oehler. Both he and RJ had been friends with the late Harvey Brown, the poet behind Frontier Press -- Philip had drawn the cover for Dorn's winterbook that Harvey had published.

  Philip is a terrific painter and has an amazing mind for poetry, anthropology, trees, hermetic traditions. He has been studying Blake and Olson for more than two decades; he studied with Frankenthaler in the late sixties, etc. So the collaboration came out of our friendship and our love of poetry and my love for him and for his paintings. We also collaborated on *Parrot Drum*; it was one of Renee Gladman's Leroy books with Japanese binding. It turned out very lovely. Right now, Anna Fulford of Macaw Macaw Press (in Tucson) has arranged a collaboration for me with the Tucson artist Mary Marbourg for a fine arts book (accordion).

  I haven't thought about drawings for the next full length book.

  I often get a sense that where your poems are the most playful they are at the same time disarming us for their most grave or gravely political moments. From your new chapbook Poems out on Dos Press, I'm thinking of the closing stanza of "Upsidedown Again":

  A woman is the person
  the first person
  like a chicken before an egg

  or: in the poem "Towels":

  Mama?
  What-a?

  I need you I need something
  I can't do it alone Papa Mama

  What you
  I love you Pooh
  flying on the balloon
  and spitting out bees

  What strikes me here is the way the poem gives this stark snapshot of domesticity -- its tenderness, even its banality -- yielding both an intimacy, and a playfulness that refract off of one another -- and all of this without any description, which is so common to contemporary poetry. I read your poems as being of-the-moment, snapshot lyrics of a "now" (there is a lively thinking that seems at home with uncertainty and the present in a line like "Could I clean them in the creek?"; it doesn't feel like a metaphor or reflection, but an actual question). In stride with this, I wonder if you write towards other poets -- living or dead -- or toward others? Or is it more of an interior space of making/working through/reflecting/positing? Does it feel like there's an audience to whom you write in the act of writing?

  I'm not sure where to start with my answer. I think that I like poems that are a lot like living, like you said, tender and banal. And also complicated, playful, placed, profound, spontaneous, confused -- and more -- and sometimes all at once. Because I think about audience a lot and I want poems that I would want to read and one of those things is to risk saying something. And another is to be honest somehow. Even if that honesty is about how you and everything feels fucked up. I don't know.

  I think of my contemporaries in terms friendships and free exchange. Dale and I run our press Skanky Possum on the gift economy and it's how we curate our reading series. We throw a big party and make food and invite conversation. Philip likens it to creating a hearth -- a virtual and literal one.

  So I have all these conversations with my contemporaries -- some literal (letters, e-mail, face to face, attending and curating readings, editing and the correspondence that comes with that) and some virtual (through reading their texts). There are a lot of poets who matter so much to me, living and dead. I try to write to them too. But I think it's mostly an interior place that I write from, even though I give the thought of poetry readership much thought.

  In terms of audience, I find it interesting (and exciting) that my book Red Juice has appealed to a lot of non-poet readers --readers that may not normally read poetry even. It was really nice to get that feedback. I have to give credit to Scott Piece of effing; his book design on Red Juice made it feel like a living thing somehow, a "real" book even though it is staple bound.

  Thank you for such a coherent answer from such a brambly question. I love your sense of honesty and appealing to non-poet readers. I was just reading Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T with my students, and this great interview with Harryette Mullen (another Texan), where she says, “there is always a danger of poetry being remote, even painful” but marks this great counterpoint in an example about Thelonious Monk allowing “us to hear a greater range of possibilities in his music” -- in a sense, inventing his own audience, or asking something from the audience. I wonder how you balance this: what’s your response when (or if) people say, “I don’t get it!” or “What’s this about?!” Does that signal something negative or positive about what your poems are doing? I guess it’s a question about how you balance being “remote” and plainly “accessible”? What’s your response to those folks?

  Funny, I still don't think of myself as a Texan, although I have lived in Austin for 11 years. I grew up on the east coast in Maryland just outside of DC. Ken Rumble, who grew up not far from where I did, was here last night and read in our series from his new book Key Bridge, which is a meditation on place (DC) coming out of Olson. So we had a lot of corresponding engagements with poetry and we figured out that in terms of place, our first coordinate was Bish Thompson's seafood restaurant in Bethesda where my mother worked as a waitress.

  Anyway, yes, I've had people say that they didn't understand my works, especially my earlier ones where I was submerging the narrative. And I've had people, like my sister, say that they understood the same poems differently (better) when they heard me read them. Once, at a small gathering of friends, my mother read my poems with me. The poet Linh Dinh had translated several into Vietnamese (and I can't express how much that means to me). So she read them in Vietnamese and then I read them in English. Afterwards someone asked her what she thought and she said "I have no idea what she is saying." To which I just laughed. Sometimes I don't know what I "mean," too. But I don't think you need to hit people over the head with content and meaning. Whenever I encounter that in poetry, I feel pandered to, manipulated and/or bored.

  I actually began writing poetry in that mode: fairly linear lyric "I," very controlled and image-filled, formulaic-epiphany-at-the-end etc. I was in my early twenties and at the time, I hadn't read enough poetry to know there was a lot more out there. I was frustrated writing this way. I felt there had to be something else. I was interested in punk, power-pop and new wave music in my youth and I realized that I wanted my poems to be more like that -- a bit gritty, surprising, earnest, agitated. Luckily (and I mean blind luck), I studied poetry at New College in San Francisco with Tom Clark, Lyn Hejinian, Gloria Frym and David Meltzer and they helped me figure it out in a huge way.

  And, I’m curious, what do your sons make of this? Have they read your poems, or do you read your work to them?

  My oldest son is six and a half and can enjoy poetry (he's been to many many readings). He's a big Dr. Suess fan so he especially likes it when the sound is fun. When Jenn Coleman read recently from a particularly playful poem, he laughed and said "That was funny!" He hasn't said much about my poems but he likes to stand next to me on stage with me when I read.

  You mentioned Linh Dinh's translations of your poems into Vietnamese -- and I'm wondering about your relationship with that language. One bio for you that I found reads: "Hoa Nguyen was born in the year of the Fire Horse’s final phase in a town near Saigon Vietnam. As a girl entering public school, Hoa was given the name 'Millie.' She was raised in the Washington DC area, lived in San Francisco, and moved to Austin, Texas in 1997." What's your relationship with Vietnam? with the language? Do you still have family outside Saigon? Have you returned much since you moved to the States?

  I was a young toddler when I left Vietnam with my mother and her husband (a white American working for the State Department). It was just after the Tet Offensive, deep in the war when sentiments in the US were not so great. It was a difficult time to be Vietnamese (or in my case, half). I could speak a few words of Vietnamese but it was never spoken in my household. My mother immersed herself in US culture, learned to speak English, worked outside of the home -- she had few family members left and severed those ties with the move -- so I never spoke it. I still do not, sadly. But the language rides on my nerves when I hear it; it stirs me in some fundamental way. I taught a workshop at Naropa one summer called "Lost Languages" -- an attempt to write toward some never-had tongue. I sometimes think that is why I write poetry. Trying to conjure something barely available, seeking to retrieve it.

  I know Vietnamese to be a very musical language (it's tonal). One history of its use is in oral verse, a folk tradition that links, can be updated, repeated, shared, contemporary, historical, about ordinary things, about courtly things. When I was a girl I found and read the book "Ten Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry" at my local public library. I still remember the first line of the introduction; it said something like "The Vietnamese say that they have always been poets." That really struck me and I will confess here that I stole the book (sorry Kensington Public Library!) because I felt it was my birthright and since there were so few Vietnamese Americans in Montgomery County Maryland at the time (hence the unfortunate nickname "Millie"), I felt that I was the one who could benefit from it the most. I know I did benefit; I think it gave me permission to seek poetry.

  Do all poets feel like they are the outside of the outside of the outside? I suspect they do. For me that's articulated in this remoteness: from culture, from identity, from language. In 1997, the Watermarks project sent me their rejections of poems for their contemporary Vietnamese American anthology the same week that the Talisman anthology solicited my work for their anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (a rather white context). It was a bittersweet thing. It continues now, feeling very outside of editorial gatherings of Asian American poetry in print (most recently, the "Next Generation" anthology). But I
  think that's more about how I choose to engage, lineages, aesthetics. And very likely the powers of coterie. But happily, I'll appear in an exciting Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American anthology, brought out by Milkweed next year (Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover are the editors). And there again, as the only monolingual and mix-raced person, that outside of the outside of the outside theme prevails. I'm thrilled to appear there nonetheless.

  I've been planning a trip to Vietnam for years. Money, time and child bearing has delayed the time line. I'm looking forward to visiting there, bringing my family, when our boys are older, can remember it and better endure the necessary vaccinations. I have to do research there in order to complete a project that includes a biography of my mother's life (which was colorful: left her rural village at 15, worked in a traveling circus as a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman circus troupe, etc.).

  I'm so curious to hear a bit more about your mother. Can you describe what she was like growing up and what you imagine for the project about her life?

  My mother was raised in a small rural village by traditional Buddhist grandparents in the Mekong Delta. Her own mother split when she was young; her father left to work for the French. They raised pigs, rice, sold flowers for festivals. She recalls air raids from an early age, but she is not very forthcoming about her life in Vietnam. It's hard to piece together the details of her life because there is a basic turning away from that period. Many difficulties and terrible memories -- and yet through it she had some essential steeliness that she drew on (still does) to survive and thrive.

  The project would be about how it's impossible to write about her and her life. About being a woman with a strong sense of self and pushing against ascribed roles. About myself too, probably, trying to puzzle it together and failing to do that.

  Really, it might never get done.

  What's your sense of "po biz," and/or the blogosphere for poetry, the way that enables, performs, or counteracts communities for poetry?

  O po biz is a funny thing. It can be linked to coterie -- which is about lineages and alliances and who you are in conversation with and who is a familiar with your works. It is maybe also a problem of audience. That is, different people will receive your works in totally different ways, natch, and sometimes coteries color, dismiss, or misread it.

  My sense of community is down-home: dinner parties and visiting at length.

  I don't read blogs for the most part. I just can't fit them into my life much. I keep up from a distance and I'm usually amused-slash-annoyed at the possibilities for misunderstandings and the sense that people write things that they would never say to you in person.

  What would be your advice to beginning poets? What do you wish you'd known when you began writing? -- or when you stole that library book!

  I think my early points of reference of women poets were Plath and Dickinson. Kinda bleak prospects, in terms of outcome, you know. It seemed to me then either death by my own hand and death by isolation. I literally had no idea to live as a poet, to be a poet or that it even was a choice to be one.

  I remember I used to look at the back pages of Poets and Writers in my local big box bookstore and just sink as I read all the calls for submissions and calls manuscripts. It was a big message-in-a-bottle kind of proposal. With attached readers fees checks.

  I think it would have helped to hear that poetry is about engagement, not fame, not recognition. That it is most often defined by how you engage with the conversation of poetry with your contemporaries -- and with the dead -- and to do so from a position of generosity.

  One very astute student poet once asked me this very question, in lieu of a close read of her manuscript of poems: how can one be a poet? It was a practical question. I suggested that she get a day job that would allow her some mind-space, access to office supplies and a computer, and where she would be more or less unobserved. I also should have added that she should take care of her teeth.

  Can I add one more thing here?

  Yes, of course!

  My name is pronounced "Hwa Win." And I say it with an American accent.

• Poets.org NOTE: Academy of American Poets - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/hoa-nguyen

  Hoa Nguyen
  Hoa Nguyen
  Related Schools & Movements:
  Contemporary
  Hoa Nguyen was born January 26, 1967, in the Mekong Delta near Saigon, Vietnam. When she was eighteen months old, she moved to the United States and was raised in the Washington, D.C., area. Nguyen earned her MFA at the New College of California in San Francisco, where she studied with Tom Clark and Lyn Hejinian, and remained active in the Bay Area poetry scene for years before moving in 1997 to Austin, Texas, where she lived for fourteen years. While in Austin, Nguyen cofounded—along with her husband, poet Dale Smith—Skanky Possum, a small press poetry journal and book imprint through which they published the work of poets such as Amiri Baraka, Linh Dinh, Eileen Myles, and Alice Notley.

  Nguyen is the author of four poetry collections: Red Juice: Poems 1998–2008 (Wave Books, 2014), As Long as Trees Last (Wave Books, 2012), Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey Press, 2009), and Your Ancient See Through (Subpress, 2002).

  “Hoa Nguyen’s poems might appear fragmented at first—like pieces of broken china … but the pieces of image and story that make up her poems prove to be more particle than fragment, each integral and necessary. The space between these particles is as meaningful as the space between stars. The poems move according to an order that reveals its presence slowly, offering humor and beauty as rewards along the way,” writes Iris Cushing in BOMB.

  Nguyen has performed, lectured, and fulfilled residencies at a number of colleges and universities, including Brown University, Buffalo State, Naropa University, the Toronto New School of Writing, and the University of Texas at Austin. She currently teaches poetics at Ryerson University and lives in Toronto.

  Selected Bibliography

  Red Juice: Poems 1998–2008 (Wave Books, 2014)
  As Long as Trees Last (Wave Books, 2012)
  Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey Press, 2009)
  Your Ancient See Through (Subpress, 2002)

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/hoa-nguyen

  Hoa Nguyen
  Poet Details
  http://www.hoa-nguyen.com

  Hoa Nguyen is the author of five books and more than a dozen chapbooks, including Violet Engery Ingots (Wave Books, 2016), Tells of the Crackling (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 (Wave 2014), and As Long As Trees Last (Wave, 2012). With her husband, the poet Dale Smith, she founded the small press and journal Skanky Possum.

  Nguyen lives in Toronto where she teaches poetics in a private workshop and at Ryerson University, as well as Miami University and Bard College.

• Hoa Nguyen Home Page - http://www.hoa-nguyen.com/about/

  About
  Hoa Nguyen
  Hoa Nguyen

  Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the DC area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. She is the author of As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice, and Violet Energy Ingots published by Wave Books.

  An experienced teacher of poetics in numerous settings, Nguyen currently teaches at Ryerson University, for Miami University’s low residency MFA program, in the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College and in a long-running, private poetics workshop.

  Her poetry has been collected in many anthologies including Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion (Abram Books 2016), Best Canadian Poetry In English 2015 and 2016 (Tightrope Books), The Volta Book of Poets (Sidebrow, 2015), Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sound: The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose (City Lights 2009), The Best of Fence (Fence Books 2009), For the Time Being: A Bootstrap Anthology (Bootstrap Books 2008), Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions 2008), and Not for Mothers Only (Fence Books 2007).

  In 1997, Nguyen designed and implemented an online youth poetry workshop for New York City based Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Students were youth ages 14 – 18; the workshop introduced participants to new writing strategies, encouraged them to develop critical skills and the creation of poetry with focused writing exercises. Discussion and feedback took place in an open online forum; the poetry exercises were indexed on the front page of the Virtual Poetry Workshop (nearly one hundred by its conclusion) so that teachers wishing to introduce poetry writing in the classroom could it as a resource from which to draw specific ideas.

  In addition, since 1998, Nguyen has led private poetry writing workshops. These eight- to thirteen-week sessions are held three times a year and include in-person as well as virtual participants. Under Nguyen’s guidance, workshop participants engage a primary text by a single poet and write out of resonances and in response to prompts and other considerations drawn from and in dialogue with it. Poets Niedecker, Kyger, Ted Berrigan, Spicer, Whalen, Susan Howe, Creeley, Dickinson, Stein, and Charles Olson are among those that Nguyen has taught. Her workshops enjoy an international following; it has been referred to as “legendary” and “iconic” and have counted many established poets as repeat participants. An essay on the class is included in the anthology Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa, 2010).

  With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded a small press journal of poetry and poetics, publishing contemporary poets such as Amiri Baraka, Alice Notley, Linh Dinh, Kenward Elmslie and Eileen Myles. Nationally distributed, Skanky Possum has received attention from national media such as The Baltimore Sun and Poets and Writers. In 2002, as editor of Best American Poetry, Robert Creeley selected poems by four poets that were published in issue 6 of Skanky Possum. Skanky Possum’s catalogue has been collected by several prominent archives and Special Collections including San Francisco University, SUNY Buffalo, University of Arizona’s Poetry Center, and the New York Public Library.

  Nguyen has been invited to perform her work, act as poet in residence, and lecture on poetry for Universities, conferences and literary organizations internationally, including Brown University, Providence, RI; Ryerson University and The Toronto New School of Writing, Toronto, ON; the University of Texas, Austin, TX; University of Washington, Pullman, WA; the Charles Olson Centenary Conference, Vancouver, BC; Buffalo State, Buffalo, NY; the Association for Asian American Studies Conference, Austin, TX; Naropa University, Boulder, CO; and the Belladonna Conference, New York, NY.

Violet Energy Ingots
Publishers Weekly. 263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Full Text:
Violet Energy Ingots

Hoa Nguyen. Wave (Consortium, dist.), $18 trade paper (104p) ISBN 978-1-940696-34-8

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In her first book of new work since Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008, Nguyen further develops her impactful, complex, and lyrical style. Nguyen's poems blend startling imagery with a calming sense of stasis. Her work has been described as a feminist ecopoetics, the basis of which can be seen in moments of subtle fascination with the natural world. This naturalist preoccupation appears woven throughout, as when she writes, Violets you can eat/ day/night How to curl trees Leave them// Pine swung oak aloof." Nguyen's simple, colloquial syntax often belies the energy and ingenuity of her work. In these new poems, Nguyen seems especially immersed in her own process and in the essence of writing, engaged with the root of the words/ not the fucking use/ made purposed and stupid." Repeatedly, she interrupts a poem to insert a correction: Buffer cap/I mean buttercup Fool." Nguyen has no problem evading the purposed and stupid" use of words, relying instead on sensation and sound. As a result, how and why Nguyen chooses to intertwine her words can seem inexplicable, but the poems emerge as whirlwinds of phrases and meaning that readers would never have otherwise imagined. (Sept.)

"Violet Energy Ingots." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 48. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444513&it=r&asid=f383ee729daea033a656d64aef3530f1. Accessed 11 May 2017.

• Full Stop
  http://www.full-stop.net/2017/02/07/reviews/miriam-w-karraker/violet-energy-ingots-hoa-nguyen/
  Word count: 1599

  February 7, 2017
  Violet Energy Ingots – Hoa Nguyen

  by Miriam W. Karraker

  Violet Energy Ingots cover[Wave Books; 2016]

  Hoa Nguyen’s newest collection, Violet Energy Ingots is a lesson in the poetics of disturbance. This is clear from the two epigraphs, both of which signal the poet’s concern with the moment when mundanity and language are frightened from stasis. One of Nguyen’s dedications is to Aphrodite, who is “deathless and of the spangled mind,” and another, an epigraph from Jack Spicer:

  When shall I start to sing
  A loud and idiotic song that makes
  The heart rise frightened into poetry
  Like birds disturbed?

  From here on in, the reader encounters powerful women like Hatshepsut, The Furies, and Eve as well as domestic scenes of motherhood, composing a note to a friend, and the act of writing poetry. One could read this all in terms of a consciousness engaged with the metaphysical, the mundane, and language’s role in bridging these two worlds. Beyond this though, Nguyen makes it imperative that the reader find new capability in disturbance. For instance, see “Autumn 2012 Poem”:

  Call capable
  a lemony
  light & fragile

  Time like a ball and elastic

  so I can stop burning the pots

  “Autumn 2012 Poem” familiarizes the reader with the eloquent disturbance Nguyen is after in the collection as a whole. In the world of this poem, light and time are used as a way of bridging the everyday and philosophical, but to what end? Why bother assigning language of capability and elasticity to these things that are fleeting? The speaker says, “so I can stop burning the pots,” which catches my eye. Why would the pots be burning in the first place? Perhaps due to neglect, forgetfulness, or distraction. Nguyen doesn’t address these concerns immediately; rather, her poem unwinds itself slowly. Later, the poem moves towards making this a discussion about language itself as the speaker remarks,

  She is her but I don’t re-
  member remember
  the ashes I obsess She said

  I was obsessed with
  (not wanting to work with
  ashes)

  As the earlier stanza narrates forgetfulness, here we encounter the speaker performing an act of remembrance, though it is filtered through and obfuscated by the “she” buried in the sentence’s syntax. The speaker’s remembrance is disembodied, even in language. The speaker’s obsession or interest is stated blatantly, though set aside in parentheses, which visibly disrupt the idea further. “(not wanting to work with ashes)” itself looks like a remnant in its set-asideness. This idea is troubled even further by the phrase’s syntax; the speaker’s desire is in working with something complete, but this is said in terms of the speaker’s negative “not wanting” rather than affirmative “want.” The speaker then is dealing with mere remnants, ashes, and perhaps the world never presents itself as fully complete in the world of this poem. Throughout its body, verbs are curtailed before they are fully put on the page, and sometimes these verbs are corrected and the poem performs a dance of interruption and revision.

  I walk I wal—
  I walks down sometimes
  Why the advi—

  Abide the advice was

  Not “Fair better”
  but “Fail better”

  The language of this poem stutters, unravels as the speaker carries out actions necessary to life. Rather than landing on “I walk” as the action for the speaker, the shift to “I walks” animates the “I” as an entity almost disembodied from the speaker. This makes me recall Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, in which she states, “The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbols never perfectly match. Eros is in between.” Though in Nguyen’s poem, we’re not dealing with lovers but rather the “I” as both body in motion and metaphysical seer in precarious balance.

  In “Sonnet for Mir Mir’s Head,” Nguyen enacts another instance of fraught desire, though this time in much more overt language.

  […]

  The milk and country
  A yell of living No remedy for this
  Desire sín remedio
  Especially the failed desire

  Without object It aches right there
  Right there where the vocal slides

  The poet sings a song in which the rhymes strain and stretch to find resonances with one another. The poem references Norse figure Mir Mir (the rememberer, the wise one), but while reading this poem, like many poems in the collection, I didn’t feel like I needed to understand the reference right away. Though I am interested in the myth, in which Mir Mir’s head spouts knowledge and counsel to the god Odin post-decapitation, I’m more interested in Desire as a state, sín remedio or, without remedy. In the context of this poem, desire lacks remedy because there is no object of desire to begin with. Without an object of desire to remedy understanding for the speaker or audience, or in other instances, the speaker existing in a state of not-want, Nguyen seems to suggest we look at the space in between her juxtapositions, examine what is in suspension post-disturbance.

  In considering what composes Nguyen’s poetic disturbances, I find myself returning to the collection’s title and read these poems as a series of ingots. An ingot is a mass of metal cast into a shape easy for storage and further processing. An ingot is a kind of placeholder state of existence where precious material waits as a cash reserve, or to be made into something else. Nguyen’s poetics are not unlike gold bricks: dense, full of mundane matter (think irises, red candies, hands), gesturing towards the otherworldly (language itself, goddesses, hauntings, history) in a precarious balance, formed by a process of delicate alchemy. An excerpt from “Haunted Sonnet”:

  Haunt lonely and find when you lose your shadow
  Secretive house centipede on the old window

  You pronounce Erinyes as “Air-n-ease
  Alecto: the angry Megara: the grudging

  Tisiphone: the avenger (voice of revenge)
  “Women guardians of the natural order”

  Think of the morning dream with ghosts
  Why draw the window’s card and wear the gorgeous

  Queen of Swords crown […]

  “Haunt lonely” sounds like an imperative when followed by “and find when you lose your shadow.” I wonder if all hauntings are lonely, and what it means to concretely find something as already fleeting and illusory as a shadow. The poem hinges on a slight reinterpretation of the Oresteia in which, after the matricide of Clytemnestra by Orestes, the Erinyes (The Furies) follow Orestes demanding blood vengeance even though Apollo commanded the murder in the first place. Nguyen gives the address, “Your job is/to rescue the not-dead woman before she enters/the incinerating garbage chute,” and here I feel implicated as a reader by the use of second person, but also interested in what it means to be “not-dead.” I think this phrasing means to suggest that the woman, a Clytemnestra figure is not quite alive, perhaps near death, and perhaps it’s not too late and she can still be saved. The woman “Forever a fought doll” asks “What do you know about Vietnam?” to which the poet answers: “Violet energy ingots Tenuous knowing moment.” This poem, like many of the poems in the book, negotiates the autobiographical (Nguyen was born outside Saigon, grew up in Washington, D.C. and currently lives in Toronto), historical, metaphysical and the mythic all at once. Nguyen’s poetics are such tenuous knowing moments: disparate genres and materials are drawn together and distilled in each poem — distilled but also activated and bright, ingot-like.

  “To Seek” has some of my favorite lines in the entire collection, beginning with “To seek too much/attention etc./To be careful and mouth all the words/My glories are morning and purple.” We listen to Marvin Gaye alongside the speaker in one moment, and witness her forgetting why she was crying in the next before moving through fragments describing the fabrics she wears, and her consideration of making dinner while interrogating language:

  Should start
  dinner and the surface is scored
  The impressions trying too hard

  I want the root of the words
  not the fucking use
  Made purposed and stupid

  Many any root feet be
  May my root feet be

  This poem’s ending more bluntly expresses the underpinnings to Nguyen’s poetic movements, all the stutters, parentheticals, homophones, strained slant rhyme, impossible desires, etc., made throughout the book. More than this though, the poem expresses a frustration with the fear of getting words wrong as we mouth along to the existing impressions of language. Sometimes language feels too worn, “scored,” and used up. And this is why Nguyen is interested in the roots, the parts of things, their underpinnings so that she may disrupt language.

  Miriam W. Karraker writes poetry and is pursuing an MFA at the University of Minnesota. She writes for Bitch Media and The Loft Literary Center. Some of her poems can be found at TAGVVERK.

• Boston Review
  http://bostonreview.net/poetry/hoa-nguyen-violet-energy-ingots
  Word count: 2076

  Accessible Difficulty
  RYO YAMAGUCHI
  Sep 14, 2016
  Topics: POETRY CRITICISM
  Share:
  The Milky Way galaxy / NASA

  Violet Energy Ingots
  Hoa Nguyen
  Wave Books, $18.00 (paper)

  Hoa Nguyen’s poetry is not easy. Her style is elliptical and sonically driven, prone to the non sequitur and the homophone. Her poems turn rapidly away from each scene or sentiment they consider, one moment watching flowers bob in the wind, the next rhyming words in a kind of étude, and the next caught in an outburst so emotionally direct we are surprised to see it in a poem at all. We might think we are in comfortable mythological territory in a poem like “Diana Was the Moon,” from her latest collection Violet Energy Ingots, but right away we see we are not:

  Full moon
  that air between ears

  Brutal was how I put it
  You captive in the bathroom

  I am staring not starving
  maybe starring not scarring

  I think this is instead a cancer
  cell proliferation
  In this short passage, Nguyen puts the moon—symbol of all symbols—into the emptiness of the mind, addresses an unseen interlocutor with words of intimate sympathy, gets caught in a childlike rhyming game, and then leaps into strangely specific medical territory in what could be a wry assessment of an unknown condition, a metaphor, or an inside joke. To follow Nguyen here—deploying so many verbal strategies in rapid succession—is like trying to follow the tip of a fencer’s sword.

  Difficulty in poetry can be categorized. Some poems make reference to history and literature on nearly every line; others break language down into barely sensible syllabic mutterings; still others bury their meanings in reticent images. Nguyen’s work combines all of these techniques, but she unifies them with a raw emotional force that more palpably vibrates the deeper one settles into her poems.

  To follow Nguyen is like trying to follow the tip of a fencer’s sword.
  This force and the sense of psychological intimacy it affords make Nguyen a surprisingly inviting poet, despite how challenging her poems can appear. Joshua Marie Wilkinson says that Nguyen “dislodges the domestic from its normative articulations,” and this technique has reached its culmination in Violet Energy Ingots. These are deeply personal, domestic poems, caught up in household activities, the nuances of partnership and parenthood, changing weather, and the day-to-day turbulences that make up the real terrain of our emotional lives: frustration with loved ones, appreciation for our children, fond but sometimes ambivalent remembrances of the past, and bitterness toward the entrenched injustices of our larger society.

  Nguyen does not approach these subjects directly, however. Her poems seem to communicate outward from a subconscious that is organized by quantum probabilitiesof resonance and reference. They are messy, haphazard, and playful. They accrue obsessions—sonic and thematic tics—that come together with livewire resonance like the hum of an electric fence. In “Dear Love Not As One,” for example, she patterns color in a personal address buried in the narrative of a camping trip:

  I think of you as pine crust
  oak stairs boys’ feet free
  crystal center

  We find red for vivid
  fucking red for birth
  blood and my
  tongue color

  Captured me at first

  I know I’m not to be the center
  sharply yellow(ish)

  Why ask that we sing
  “Build me up

  Buttercup, baby”
  (just to let me down)
  Yellow and red are complexly contrasted with each other. Yellow—in the pine resin, oak stairs, buttercup, and the speaker’s own “center”—surrounds the vivid red of sex, blood, birth, and body, appearing on both sides of the short stanza where those red elements appear. Yellow here feels insidious, inescapable—a sense that climaxes with a song, a haunting, nostalgic earworm that we realize has been playing in the background of the speaker’s mind. The song drowns out the speaker’s own vocalizations until she herself seems to be mouthing its words as her own (notice that the final line dispenses with quotation marks). It seizes control of the poem and suffocates the speaker, as though stilling her in an amber crystal. These lines assemble an extraordinary mimetic moment, one reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s slowly developing narcosis in “Poppies in July,” and yet even more complex with the color-play it involves.

  Sound organizes Nguyen’s poems in various ways, from subtly echoing vowel sounds to nearly homophonic close rhymes that edge on hip-hop. In “Mekong I,” for instance, she twists a series of assonant chains into a dazzling sonic thread:

  How to strand become
  mangroves stranded

  and braid your oiled hair

  Vivid swoops that coil
  a mouth and canal steered

  Row from here to there.
  She moves deftly from the short “a” sounds in “strand” and “mangrove” to the longer vowels and diphthongs in “oiled,” “swoops,” and “mouth,” the whole section hinged on “braid,” which unites these two sound patterns at the same time that it does heavy symbolic lifting as an image both of femininity and the landscape. The result is a materially and thematically rich exploration of self, history, and geography—all in hardly twenty words.

  To perform analyses like these on Nguyen’s poems, however, is to be left with frayed ends. These poems never operate perfectly according to a logical system; the mind behind them is simply too overgrown. If the term I have been using to locate the source of these poems—the “subconscious”—usually suggests Freudian themes of childhood fixation and arrested development, Nguyen’s poems are a refreshing counterpoint: her poetic subconscious is positively adult, balancing an array of mature concerns that include but also go beyond baser impulses such as lust and anger. This psychological range allows for a fair amount of diversity in the collection. Domestic life does figure heavily, but it is the domestic life of a feminist poet and scholar with a specific cultural heritage living in the political turbulence of the twenty-first century, and all of these elements are incorporated—assimilated—into the subconscious material on which she draws.

  These poems never operate perfectly according to a logical system; the mind behind them is simply too overgrown.
  Thus Nguyen gives us several of what appear to be directly engaged political poems, with titles such as “Machiavelli Notes,” “A Brief History of War,” and “A September Eleventh Poem.” (She has also recently contributed to two politically oriented anthologies, Political Punch and Privacy Policy.) Some of the most familiar political poetry of recent decades relies on realism as a defining force of witness—one might think of Carolyn Forché’s acute focus in her famous poem “The Colonel.” But Nguyen writes from the long alternative tradition of experimental political poetry, poetry that operates by surprising and subverting our expectations in ways that illuminate the paradoxes of political life. In “Who Was Andrew Jackson?,” she offers a short list of statements that alternate banal generalities (“He was poor but ended up rich”) with similarly general accounts of his atrocities (“He was an enslaver of men, women, and children.”). The technique captures the ambivalence modern North Americans often have toward their inherited history of violence—the impulse to compress that history into generalizations in order to carry it around as common knowledge.

  In “Eve,” one of her more explicitly feminist poems, the speaker eschews a gesture of protest or empowerment for the brasher opportunity to belittle Adam for his pride: “My man is embarrassed // kicked out / of the world-garden / to become farmers.” The tone of this moment is complex in the most human ways: sarcastic and chiding, yet full of real regret. The speaker does not critique the power of class but briefly appeals to it—insinuating a pejorative connotation of “farmers”—while using an idiom that seems far from feminist discourse: “my man.” The moment as a whole effects a kind of marital squabbling that Nguyen embraces rather than transcends.

  With a completely different style, subject matter, and tone, the poem “Hid” addresses Nguyen’s Vietnamese heritage from her distant life in Toronto with a sophisticated tenderness that breaks down into stuttering tautological negation:

  Eels & water snakes
  ½ moon the moon is halved
  and I swear you are dead

  The dead hang
  cormorant wings

  We watch the special features
  they grind wheeling over Leslie Spit

  Can mourn the dead of something
  Denuded trees

  Am mourning dead not dead
  The poem comprises a series of small, smart maneuvers: the sustained theme of “halving,” the violent enjambment between “dead hang / cormorant wings,” the surprising introduction of an indirect object in “mourn the dead of something,” and the suggestion of “A.M. morning” in “Am mourning,” which relocates this mourning within the quotidian.

  Such techniques (and the others I’ve highlighted) evidence a professionalism that is itself assimilated into Nguyen’s concerns: her approach to writing as an expert activity works its way in as a subject. Nguyen writes self-consciously, often retaining revisions or including commentaries on what she is doing. In “Blousy Guitar,” she interrupts herself: “I wrote ‘valley’ when I meant ‘longing’.” In “Red Voice,” she does it again: “Empire seeks power I wrote that / as ‘Vampire Empire’.” Throughout the book, she rewrites, reconsiders, and explicitly comments on her tendencies as a poet. She also engages with a larger tradition, writing homages such as “PS:,” a riff on William Carlos Williams’s “This is Just to Say”:

  If you get this
  before you leave

  take some California irises
  home with you

  Put in fridge until spring
  Plant in circle
  Another poem addresses the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and yet another reworks Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 117.” In Nguyen’s deconstructed sonnets, rhymes are slanted at such severe angles they barely find tune with each other. In “Sonnet for Mimir’s Head,” for example, Nguyen writes: “I was the song pip in the tree / is a sustaining stutter star / inside your head resides there / tells of the crackling Hung.”

  From most poets we expect maybe one or two of these approaches—a focus on identity politics or the literary tradition, on domestic matters or on the landscape. But for Nguyen none of these domains is primary. They all figure into a larger project of articulating the self, a self that is explicitly conditioned by history, culture, ethnicity, politics, literature, and the other entanglements of modern life.

  The result is challenging, to be sure. But because the self who is addressed in these poems is such a complete and complex entity—because the poet is exposing all of these areas of her life—our connection with her is accelerated. We quickly fall into a deep trust that whatever she says is earnest to the utmost, is a matter of personal importance. We might not be able to fully articulate exactly who this poet is, but we have an intuitive feeling that we know her well. This intuition affords us some comfort in what can otherwise be perplexing terrain. We feel freer to suspend our need for immediate understanding; we feel encouraged to accept uncertainty as a necessary aspect of both the self and poetry. Though at first glance her work may look too challenging to enjoy, these familiarizing and reassuring effects make Nguyen one of the best experimental poets a novice reader can pick up.

  In the end these poems leave us with an abiding sense of affirmation, a sense that life—in its messy assemblage of frustrations and joys—is profoundly necessary. One of her homages, “Poem of First Lines from Tagore Poems,” offers a few direct lines of such affirmation:

  Let me never lose hold of this shape
  Let me never lose
  Life of my life I shall ever try
  Light my life the world-filling light
  Light oh where is the light
  More life my love yet more

• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2012/11/as-long-as-trees-last-by-hoa-nguyen/
  Word count: 1059

  “AS LONG AS TREES LAST” BY HOA NGUYEN
  REVIEWED BY DAN SHEWAN
  November 9th, 2012

  Seattle’s renowned independent press, Wave Books, recently published Hoa Nguyen’s third full-length collection of poems, As Long As Trees Last. In it, Nguyen once again dares to experiment with form, structure, and language to bring us a collection of genuinely thought-provoking poems interspersed with glimpses of beauty often missed in the bustle of modern life.

  Many of the fifty-seven poems that make up As Long As Trees Last, which takes its name from a line in “Too-Fast Spring Birds,” are short, self-contained, and wonderfully intriguing. Choosing to trust her readers, Nguyen eschews the obvious, often purposefully leaving the meaning of her work open to interpretation. Nguyen’s poems linger long after the reader has finished them, posing questions with their concise and innovative use of language, and many are deserving of multiple readings.

  Opening with “Never Seen,” we are immediately presented with the evocative imagery that remains a defining characteristic of Nguyen’s work. The lyrical, yet often jarring, combinations of words provide the reader with hints of the pace and energy that make As Long As Trees Last such a compelling collection.

  Born near Saigon, Vietnam, in the political turbulence of the late 1960s, Nguyen spent her formative years in Washington, D.C., and many of the poems in As Long As Trees Last are fraught with barely controlled vitriol and cynicism. A sense of almost grim determination is especially evident in poems such as “Rage Sonnet:”

  Mother ran large food trays sore
  shoulders
  Lobster surf & turf
  It’s Independence Day 2011
  We may have been poisoned
  by Operation Ranch Hand

  I am not dead yet

  While referencing the herbicidal warfare campaign waged by the U.S. military during the
  Vietnam War, “Rage Sonnet” also speaks of the lasting spiritual casualties of the conflict, revealing a complexity and emotional resonance through a remarkable economy of words rarely seen in the work of other contemporary poets.

  Nguyen’s choice of language in poems such as “I’m Stuck” offers the reader an insight into the sense of frustration and quiet resolve often exhibited by many urbanites, and her skilful use of metaphor could also hint at the narrator’s desire to break free from dogmatic populist thinking:

  I’m stuck on a people mover
  Have to cut off the heel
  of my sock so I can leave
  the train station

  “A majority of whites
  still disapproved of interracial marriage”
  (1991)

  The search for meaning and identity in an increasingly homogenized society is a common theme throughout the collection, cleverly revealed through the offhand remarks of a cab driver in “Ridiculous Couplets,” and the weary observations of “Intimate.” These ideas are explored further in poems such as “The Problem,” which subtly addresses the conflict between consumerism and the nature of individuality. Other works, such as “US,” experiment with form to examine the apathy evident in American culture in a much more direct and confrontational manner.

  Throughout As Long As Trees Last, Nguyen transitions smoothly from the lethargy of American society to the futility and emptiness of modern life in works such as “Stimulus Drive Bulge,” which carefully balances factual data with barely restrained contempt. The gradual corruption of globalization and industrialization, both figuratively and literally, is vividly brought to life in poems such as “You Can Sample:”

  You can sample cord blood

  find rocket fuel there

  Find rocket fuel in breast milk

  also lettuce

  I wear a SpongeBob SquarePants Band-Aid
  hear the running toilet

  Money goes

  tied to the subprime

  we go

  “month to month”

  While many of the poems in As Long As Trees Last deal with the personal implications of
  modern politics, others, such as “Being,” focus on wider universal concepts, including wisdom, understanding, and personal growth. In “Being,” Nguyen captures the minutia of daily life while using it as a device to represent the reluctant acceptance that often comes with age. Other poems, such as “Valentine’s Day Sonnet,” focus almost entirely on small, everyday details, somewhat reminiscent of the work of poets like Keetje Kuipers and Steve Scafidi.

  While the beauty of the ordinary is a cohesive theme throughout the collection, longer poems, such as “Lady Xoc,” explore concepts such as female sexuality using powerful and often dramatic imagery:

  Woven basket to collect the blood

  and a diamond-patterned garment

  Paper collects

  the blood in spatters

  Mourning doves collect in trees above
  remind you of hangovers

  She is Lady Xoc
  “letting blood” there’s a purpose

  to this

  The meaning of many poems in the collection is left intentionally ambiguous. Nguyen instead relies on her characteristic use of language and juxtaposition to subtly convey the emotional undercurrents of her work, and she often experiments with form and structure to lend her poems a uniquely introspective and thoughtful quality. The to-do list of “Rain Poem,” the recollection of memories in “Dirt-Under-Nails Dirt,” and the cautious optimism of “Iodine” provide us with glimpses of vulnerability that contrast well with other bolder poems in the collection.

  The language of As Long As Trees Last makes for wonderfully evocative reading, a layer of intrigue and complexity coating the poems like the fine dust on the forgotten curios of an antique store, inviting us to touch and explore them. However, for readers unfamiliar with lyric and experimental poetry, the collection may prove somewhat daunting. While Nguyen’s use of words and imagery is rich and expressive, some readers may find As Long As Trees Last to be less accessible than the work of other poets.

  Despite this, Nguyen remains one of the most powerful, vivid, and even visceral contemporary poets working today. Readers hoping for a thought-provoking and and strikingly familiar exploration of life in 21st century America will find As Long As Trees Last to be a compelling and often moving collection.

• This Is the Title of My Blog
  https://thisisthetitleofmyblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/poetry-review-as-long-as-trees-last-by-hoa-nguyen/
  Word count: 1234

  Poetry Review: As Long as Trees Last by Hoa Nguyen
  September 13, 2012
  From “Feather:”

  We can laugh like a whip crack
  on tune

  to replenish me

  :::: trees be the church
  Me, I’m an animal with a fixed number of limbs that will only move me in one direction at a time. Trees, they don’t have that problem, with all their branchings, pushing themselves out in an exponentially growing number of directions.

  Here are some things I learned about trees in grade school: Eventually, the branching terminates in leaves. The leaves absorb light which is converted into chemical energy. This storage of energy is at the center of its metabolic process, allowing the tree to choose when and how it will be released to drive the synthesis and movement of other chemicals. Meanwhile, the water necessary for this conversion is carried up from the ground through a ubiquitous internal vascular system. However, much of that water remains unused and is released through pores into the atmosphere, contributing to the production of clouds.

  From “Hexagram #1 Poem:”

  Great first head

  The thinking stars?

  Light vibrating molecule
  (truth seed)

  The outside is the inside the wall is a door
  If this were a riddle, I’d say “the outside is the inside” is referring to language: Language is one’s interiority made physically manifest while also, in relation to the physical world we perceive, carving out our internal consciousness. The inside is the outside. But this isn’t a riddle. Riddles move the mind in a single direction – they have a definite answer. A poem branches out, a ship with multiple bearings at once. I still want to say what I said about language, but with the acknowledgement that it doesn’t solve the poem; it merely scurries along one of its branches.

  From “So Obvious:”

  So obvious feathers on a heart pen
  or beneath violet insides Open
  center when your heart is a
  small baby born

  Horn cup held inside and you wear
  a gown with dark torn
  a dark train
  and starry yellow
  flags for me maybe also
  summer cicadas
  “Heart,” “horn” and “held” all begin with an aspiration (the h sound); “born,” “horn” and “torn” all end with the orn sound. And visually, “feathers,” “beneath,” “heart” and “wear” all share the letters ea (though pronounced differently in each case). This volume just opens the door to the coincidences of English, and so uses the energy of chance to convert music into sugar… not meaning, but a stored potential for meaning and intention. Something prior to and necessary for meaning and intention; something that I can carry around with me that will drive the synthesis and movement of my interactions with the world. Kinetic energy becomes potential energy; heat is kept in cups and bowls to be spilled at the heart’s discretion. From “Absence and a Cushion:”

  Heated heart
  Carolina Wren
  you hear stabbing gold

  Is tea to drink why reach to steep
  if why is the brown cloth
  of me pulled taut to reach you there

  Out of hearts Heat
  Stab a day
  dear Heart
  that stays and spills

  We keep us vowed Cup of keep
  pink there and brown a heard hurt

  Out of that we spill

  Tea of you are days

  Away I am
  out there
  sucking at leaves
  I love how that last stanza plays on the ambiguity of leaves – the noun referring to foliage, and the verb referring to departure.

  In contrast, often a word will be used, and then quickly repeated in a very different context, as with the word “outside” in the poem “Letting It In.”

  Orbs circle light outside
  and dance squibs

  Hatch in your hat
  outside of time and I sit
  on my flower

  It feels very fine
  being a girl
  Notice, this isn’t the exploitation of homonyms/ambiguity (you wouldn’t need different dictionary entries for the two uses of the word “outside”), but a probing of its possibilities, at its center (a literal use of the word – “light outside”) and then at its border (the figurative “outside of time”). The leaves of a tree don’t have to be different in kind; difference in position and orientation allow them to accept different streams of the sun’s generosity.

  Other times, a word will be used and then almost immediately repeated, where the only change is that a different aspect of the same situation is being described, as with the word “frog” in “Unused Baby:”

  You have your apparatus
  being the Frog Husband and I burn
  your frog skin to keep you
  in the shape I prefer
  Not just the word is being repeated, but also the information is being repeated. We could infer that the husband would have frog skin, since we were already told he is a “frog Husband.” We get this again, and more obviously, with the word “place” later in the same poem:

  Wasp friend landed on my
  shoulder sparkle to say This place
  we are in is a place
  The word is double clicked to re-center the scene on that word’s significance: This place we are in is a place – we are being told that what matters isn’t the particular features of the narrator’s extension in space, but that she has a particular extension in space. Rather than augment facts, tautology is used to tighten the readers connection to a given fact. The tree needs a trunk, needs a center, needs to be held to the earth.

  The concepts of inside and outside are explored quite a bit. And cups and bowls keep appearing, which are notable for having insides that aren’t in anyway closed off from an outside; they are readily filled and emptied, filled and emptied. I’m made to feel by these poems that interior and exterior are not defined by their separation, but by their relation, their communication. I’m reminded of this poem by Emily Dickinson:

  My Cocoon tightens — Colors tease —
  I'm feeling for the Air —
  A dim capacity for Wings
  Demeans the Dress I wear —

  A power of Butterfly must be —
  The Aptitude to fly
  Meadows of Majesty implies
  And easy Sweeps of Sky —

  So I must baffle at the Hint
  And cipher at the Sign
  And make much blunder, if at last
  I take the clue divine —
  Emily Dickinson is definitely my favorite American poet, and Hoa Nguyen’s work seems to learn a lot from Dickinson, in a way that I haven’t seen in other contemporary writers. This is exciting for me.

  Hoa Nguyen has authored several previous books and chapbooks, including Your Ancient See Through and Hecate Lochia. As Long as Trees Last is published by the consistently brilliant Wave Books. Trees!

• Lemon Hound
  http://lemonhound.com/2012/12/24/hoa-nguyens-as-long-as-trees-last/
  Word count: 1610

  Hoa Nguyen’s “As Long As Trees Last”
  by LAURA on Dec 24, 2012 • 8:00 am 3 Comments

  As Long As Trees Last
  By Hoa Nguyen
  Wave Books, 2012
  Some years ago, during a seminar on Joanne Kyger in one of my favourite classes at McGill (“Poetry at the Mid-Century: the New York School and the San Francisco Renaissance”), my professor compared Kyger’s fragmentary poems to icebergs: “almost all of it is under the page level,” he said. They hint at larger meanings, to be uncovered by the reader. I couldn’t help but return to his metaphor (and, honestly, to Kyger’s work) throughout reading As Long As Trees Last, Hoa Nguyen’s new collection of poems. The fifty-seven works that comprise the collection are short but dense, and approach meaning through meticulous imagery and multisensory descriptions. One poem, for instance, opens with the aural description “toilet seat slam” (37). Elsewhere, Nguyen writes “chimes” (10, 24), inferring their sound. In the collection’s press release, Nguyen’s poems are described as “chiseled yet spacious,” but in leaving so much to be uncovered, Nguyen hands the chisel to her reader. The poems in As Long As Trees Last orbit the possibilities of selfhood. Throughout the collection, the speaker, rather than claiming coherent subjectivity or understanding of “I”, instead approaches various potential identities with the same regularity as she does quotidian tasks. We see her explore the roles of woman, mother, citizen, and even of proud poet; selfhoods that she ties intimately to spaces and nature, to histories, myths, and cultures. Some of the roles she inhabits, like when she infers motherhood with the line “my boy wears shark pajamas” (2, emphasis mine). Others she identifies with at a distance, like in the poem “US”, when she criticizes “US citizens” because they “fill up their ‘free / time’ with television” (36). The double-entendre of the title, though, of course aligns the speaker with the citizens she critiques. There’s a line in “Dirt-Under- / Nails Dirt” which might be intended to describe love, romance, or friendship, but I think it also perfectly defines the idea of the mutable self that Nguyen circles: “We love are folds / around the stripes of being” (7). Furthering her exploration of multitude identities (and, with many lines in quotation, voices), Nguyen plays with perspective and shape-shifting imagery, portraying the fluidity of the self. “Soul Poem”, for instance, moves between different points of view. Nguyen opens the poem with a description of “the soul” (but not hers), then moves to a coherent subjectivity in the next couplet, which she undermines by the couplet’s end: “I stood on a small hill / impossibly tall and alien.” The fact that the speaker feels alien in her coherent “I” exemplifies Nguyen’s rejection of a fixed identity. Suddenly, the poem’s focus shifts to the third person, fracturing the voice of speaker:
  The daughter was changed

  into a cow and then restored (9)

  This daughter is only one of several instances of shape-shifting in the collection. In “Rain Poem,” the speaker becomes (or hopes to become) “‘the Professor of Transfiguration’” (6); In “Unused Baby,” Nguyen alludes to the “Frog Husband” (10): “I burn / your frog skin to keep you / in the shape I prefer” (10).) Nguyen ends “Soul Poem” with another focal shift, shifting again to first-person and again to third (“I don’t / wear shoes …. Her ponytail / flipped when she swirled”), conveying both inner dislocation (or as she quotes elsewhere, “‘extreme fragmentation’”(41)) and a multifaceted self-awareness. As fluid as Nguyen portrays the self, most of the poems in As Long As Trees Last are grounded in the concrete realness of everyday. Quotidian responsibilities -- “Wash towels and rags / on Wednesdays” (5); “Broil the asparagus” (11) – show how much the routine of every day anchors the self. (It’s also no surprise that much of the quotidian tasks are instances of domestic work, typically female responsibilities). In “Rain Poem,” for example, Nguyen plays with the structure of the task-based To-Do list:
  To Do: Mash the sea Evolve Love Keen Coo (6)
  making the list run slightly absurd while remaining consistent with the poem’s monosyllabic rhythm and thus merging the mutable, shifting speaker with her very regular, concrete reality. Nguyen further anchors (or perhaps paralyzes) her speaker in the very real problems of debt (public and personal) and drought. In “Stimulus Drive Bulge,” she talks directly of the “ ‘Total Public Debt’ // 2001: Three point three trillion / 2009: Seventeen point three trillion” (38), and writes about personal money issues in “The Problem” (“Need a new notebook/ And what does it mean to not want”), and in “You Can Sample”: “Money goes tied to the subprime / we go / ‘month to month’” (39). My favourite allusion to the cost of life and the “problem of money” (35), though, is the repeated line “There are no free Popsicles” (40,45) in the poems “Another Drought Almost-Sonnet” and “Another Chinaberry”. Nguyen follows both iterations of the line with “I would like to see it rain again” (40, 45 with slight variation), integrating the personal drought with the natural. Between quotidian tasks and the problem of money, the morphing self is forced to stay rooted in the real. Drought is the least repeated natural imagery in the collection; as the book’s title suggests, trees, and the birds that inhabit them, recur regularly. Birds, in their diversity, become a metaphor for people, potential characteristics to inhabit: “You could be the Turkey Vulture / grooming your mate for life” (24). They also serve as metaphor for the speaker herself. In “The Spleen Rules Transformation,” Nguyen opens the poem with the line “changing plumes / bare upon a notebook” (58), paralleling the avian metaphor with the role of the poet. In the following poem, “Can’t Help it,” she continues to conflate the avian with the human:
  Where to fly exactly with split feather tails and gnaw the bow It’s the bird-hurt you feel (59)
  Anthropomorphizing birds as such provides an external projection of the fluid (flighty) self. But people, like birds, also like to “nest in translucent / comfort” (23), and throughout As Long As Trees Last, trees serve as a metaphor for the home, the environments, and the institutions that we inhabit. The poem “Feather” ends with the line “trees be the church” (32). In “Too Fast Spring Birds,” a tree is “a strong thing”, something to lean on, as well as a “hearth” (17). In the rich object poem “Chinaberry”, Nguyen details the functions and uses of the chinaberry tree. “Also called Bead Tree” (15), its fruit is poisonous to humans but turns its avian inhabitants into “Drunken songbirds” (15). When the fruit hardens, it provides “seeds for making / rosaries”. The chinaberry is a tavern and a church, each a different space for salvation. With the real comes the unreal, as Nguyen also explores definitions of the self through the reworking of myths. Nguyen depicts the duties and the powers of women through their images and stories in ancient Greek, Roman, and Mayan myths (which again brings me back to Kyger, who also retold myths in her poetry). In “Lisa’s Camile In Memoriam, April 18, 2010”, Nguyen writes:
  She is also called Enyo Bellona Goddess of War with torchlight and disheveled hair sister or daughter or wife (19).
  These female roles exist for even war goddesses like Enyo and Bellona, who were not only fighters but also sisters, daughters, and wives. In “Lady Xoc”, Nguyen defines female domestic and political roles via the Mayan myth of Lady Xoc, wife of the warrior Shield Jaguar and one of the few women in Mayan culture (or at least depicted in Mayan art) to perform rituals and have political power. “She is Lady Xoc”, performing blood-letting rituals, but she also has an enormous responsibility as wife: “how to be a Jaguar God and wife / of that You need a stingray / spine and decorated fringe coat” (21). Playing again with point of view, Nguyen depicts Lady Xoc as powerful in both her public and private roles. Comparatively, “Medusa Poem” explores another kind of female power: “These are my solo powers / hair eyes mouth tongue” (54). Medusa is sexual but not sensual. The poem is aggressive and angry. It is the one with the most profanity. “Unarmored as I am you can / take my head for your fucking / chaste warrior shield” (54). Interestingly, “Medusa Poem” is in the first person; Nguyen presents Medusa as a coherent, powerful woman. She also returns to an image of shape-shifting, although its Medusa’s victims and not herself: “Rocks that I turn you into / shift shapes like that” (55). Shape-shifting, rather than representing a fluidity of self, becomes a power and weapon. “This is me very plain” (43), Nguyen writes at the end of her poem “Bread.” Despite the multitudinous voices and selves in As Long As Trees Last, there is cohesion to the collection. The birds and the chinaberries and the very real practice of every day life all provide a structure and environment for the self to be explored. It’s this chiseled space and this fluid self that keeps bringing me back to Kyger (of whom Nguyen says she has learned a lot): “These several selves that move one self around” (Kyger, As Ever, 143). ` ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dana Drori is a freelance writer and model living in New York. She received her B.A. (honours) in English Literature at McGill University, where she wrote her thesis on the significance of the flâneuse in Virginia Woolf's works. She is easily made happy with a good collection of poetry or an early-20th century novel (the harder the aristocracy falls, the better), and wonders when, if ever, she'll go to grad school.
  Tags: Dana Drori, Hoa Nguyen, Reviews, vol. 2

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