Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Not Here
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1991
WEBSITE: https://www.hieuminhnguyen.com/
CITY: Minniapolis
STATE: MN
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2017108748
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2017108748
HEADING: Nguyen, Hieu Minh
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100 1_ |a Nguyen, Hieu Minh
370 __ |a Saint Paul (Minn.) |2 naf
372 __ |a Poetry |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Poets |2 lcsh
375 __ |a Males |2 lcdgt
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a This way to the sugar, c2014: |b title page (Hieu Minh Nguyen) back cover (Hieu Minh Nguyen was born and raised in Saint Paul, Minnesota)
PERSONAL
Born 1991, in St. Paul, MN.
EDUCATION:Warren Wilson College, M.F.A. candidate.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Muzzle Magazine, poetry editor.
AWARDS:Kundiman fellowship; fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, 2017.
WRITINGS
Contributor to publications, including Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Nashville Review, Poetry London, Poetry, and to the Newshour program on PBS.
SIDELIGHTS
Hieu Minh Nguyen is a Vietnamese American writer and editor. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, he attended Warren Wilson College. Nguyen has served as the poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. He has written works that have appeared in publications, including Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Nashville Review, Poetry London, Poetry, and on the Newshour program on PBS.
This Way to the Sugar
This Way to the Sugar, released in 2014, is Nguyen’s first collection of poems. One of the works in this volume is “White Boy Time Machine: Instruction Manual.” It begins with the narrator describing a large group of blond, white boys. He goes on to discuss his parents’ relationship with one another, then shifts back to classic Americana imagery. Nguyen commented on his intentions for the poem in an interview with a contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service website. He stated: “The white boy … is an object of the poem the same way that people of color have been the objects of history books forever. … I wanted this white boy to be a vehicle to get to narratives about my own history, or my family’s history.”
Rachel Rostad, writer on the Hyphen website, offered a review of This Way to the Sugar. Rostad remarked: “Nguyen’s writing is by turns electrifying and somber, heartrending and triumphant. He packs a devastating amount of emotion into just a few words, and each poem bristles with striking images.” Rostad concluded: “It is clear from his talent that we will be seeing important work from him for years to come.”
Not Here
In 2018, Nguyen published a second poetry collection called Not Here. This volume finds him again examining race and his family history, as well as his sexuality.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer described Not Here as “brilliant” and asserted: “Nguyen communicates with stunning clarity the ambivalence of shame, how it can
commandeer one’s life and become almost a comfort.” Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen, contributor to the Dia Critics website, commented: “Nguyen’s poems brilliantly replay the nightmare of how all traumas are connected; how one trauma leads to another and another and another; and how the abused body, when separate from the self, becomes a possession sometimes precious and sometimes despised, can self-destruct and cease its desire to live. Unlike the title of Nguyen’s book, Not Here, his poetry is very much immediate and alive. And like spirits that cannot be seen but sensed, his words will pass through generations like blood. As a reader, I honor his shadow—a haunting outline, although greater than mine, is still painfully familiar.”
Referring to the poems in Not Here, Stephanie Burt, critic on the New York Times website, suggested: “They feel at once raw and ruthlessly condensed, as if their first drafts were three times as long. Clichés, redundancies, the sort of details that flesh out a novel, have been sliced away, until even the talkiest prose blocks, those with the cadence of conversation, stand out, word by word.” Burt added: “Variety in form, and intensity of introspection, provides the surprise that Nguyen’s unvarying diction (common words, always) and his inevitable topics cannot.” Burt concluded: “Many people have similar troubles, and try to describe them, in prose poems and in verse. But very few could do what Nguyen has done.” C. Bain, writer on the Muzzle website, noted: “This is Nguyen’s second poetry collection, and it does feel like the work of a young writer. … There is an edge of clarity and urgency.” “Nguyen’s most striking gift … is finding moments of almost unbearable emotional pressure inside of the stories he is telling. You could buy this book for its clarity, its intersectionality, the specific truth-seeking which the poet has undertaken. All of those are excellent reasons to buy a book. I would buy it, instead, for its incendiary longing.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, February 19, 2018, review of Not Here, p. 53.
ONLINE
Dia Critics, http://diacritics.org/ (June 7, 2018), Anh-Hoa The Nguyen, review of Not Here.
Hieu Minh Nguyen website, https://www.hieuminhnguyen.com/ (September 5, 2018).
Hyphen, https://hyphenmagazine.com/ (April 4, 2014), Rachel Rostad, review of This Way to the Sugar.
Loft, https://writersblock.loft.org/ (January 18, 2016), Molly Fuller, author interview.
Muzzle, https://www.muzzlemagazine.com/ (June 1, 2018), C. Bain, review of Not Here.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (June 18, 2018), Stephanie Burt, review of Not Here.
Public Broadcasting Service Online, https://www.pbs.org/ (December 28, 2015), Corinne Segal, author interview.
HIEU MINH NGUYEN is a queer Vietnamese American poet and performer based out of Minneapolis. Recipient of 2017 NEA fellowship for poetry, Hieu is a Kundiman fellow, a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine, and an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. His work has appeared in PBS Newshour, POETRY Magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed, Poetry London, Nashville Review, Indiana Review, and more. His debut collection of poetry, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) was named a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the MN Book Award. His second collection of poetry, Not Here, is forthcoming with Coffee House Press in 2018.
QUOTED: "The white boy … is an object of the poem the same way that people of color have been the objects of history books forever. ... I wanted this white boy to be a vehicle to get to narratives about my own history, or my family’s history."
Hieu Minh Nguyen challenges white supremacy in poems about his family
Poetry Dec 28, 2015 12:54 PM EDT
Hieu Minh Nguyen‘s poems travel through time.
Nguyen, a Minneapolis-based poet who writes on race, queerness and history, dove into the past with “White Boy Time Machine: Instruction Manual.” The piece is the first in a series of poems that challenge white supremacy and trace its effect on Nguyen’s family, in particular his mother, who emigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam.
Nguyen, 24, brings whiteness to the forefront with the poem’s title, but discards it immediately in the narrative, subverting literary traditions that prioritize white narrators. Whiteness is a jumping-off point for the speaker’s “time travel” to experiences of the past, he said.
“The white boy … is an object of the poem the same way that people of color have been the objects of history books forever,” Nguyen said. “I wanted this white boy to be a vehicle to get to narratives about my own history, or my family’s history.”
Told in brief declarations spread over the page, the poem is a conversation between past and present — an exploration that began with studying social justice-oriented theater, Nguyen said. “I realized that theater and performance and writing can be about you, and not something you hear and memorize from a white man,” he said.
Several vignettes show flashes of Nguyen’s family’s history. One section describes how “I bit his lip / & the ash spat back / my grandmother’s bones.” In that moment, “I tried to explain how every time I’ve been intimate with a white body, it’s felt like history was always present,” he said.
You can read the poem and hear Nguyen read it below.
White Boy Time Machine: Instruction Manual
In the beginning there was corn, a whole state
of boys, blonde as the plants surrounding them.
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll:::
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllOh, but why am I here?
lllllllllllllllIt seems important to mention all the things
llllllllllllllllthat went wrong: once, my mother loved a field & fled
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllfrom the sight of its singed body.
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllOnce, my mother kissed my father
lllllllllllllll& the corners of his lips unraveled
lllllllllllllll& a child twice his size came out.
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllOnce, the child cried & cried & cried
lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllluntil someone put something in its mouth.
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll:::
Near the quarry, a population of humming
lllllllllllllllboy machines—humming love songs & the National Anthem
humming drive-in movies & pick-up trucks
lllllllllllllllhumming ball caps & slow dances & pebbles at your window.
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll:::
I guess I’m trying to explain what’s happening
lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllwithout leaving:
I took his hand
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll& the geese came back
lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllfor autumn.
I bit his lip
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll& the ash spat back
lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllmy grandmother’s bones.
I rose from his lap
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll& the dirt sunk
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllla hundred years.
I laid in his bed
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll& watched everyone
lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllfall into their mothers.
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll:::
I went back to catch a boy who fell from a tree
& the scars folded back into my knees.
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll:::
llllllllDon’t ask me how.llllllllDon’t ask if I’m a ghost.
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll:::
lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllI know, I know it sounds strange
lllllllllllllllclimbing inside a boy & crawling
out into yesterday’s light.
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll:::
Somewhere somewhere
llllllllllllllla school of metal-clad boys.
Somewhere somewhere
lllllllllllllllmy mother is just a girl.
Somewhere somewhere
llllllllllllllla white man hands her a flower
& my eyes flicker blue.
Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of “This Way to the Sugar” (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), which was a finalist for both a Lambda Literary Award, and a Minnesota Book Award. Hieu is a Kundiman fellow, and a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. His poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal, Ninth Letter, Devil’s Lake, The Paris-American, Vinyl, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Minneapolis, where he flails his arms. This poem was first published at Devil’s Lake.
Support for Poetry Provided By:
Poetry Foundation
Left: Photo by Hieu Minh Nguyen
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By — Corinne Segal
Corinne is the Senior Multimedia Web Editor for NewsHour Weekend. She serves on the advisory board for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and graduated from Tufts University, where she studied English literature.
Lit Chat: Meet Hieu Minh Nguyen
Posted on Mon, Jan 18 2016 1:00 pm by Molly Fuller
I’ve been wanting to interview Hieu Minh Nguyen for three reasons.
First, for his debut collection of poetry, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing), a breakout success that earned a nomination for both the 2015 Minnesota Book Award (truly an honor among honors considering the poetry talent in this state) and the Lambda Literary Award (sharing the shortlist with the likes of Saeed Jones and Jericho Brown).
Second, because he can rock many a hat (an accomplishment requiring no further explanation). And third, because his press kit contains this pull quote from Muzzle magazine: "He is a poet with a complete grasp on what he is trying to do," followed by this quote from himself: "I have no idea what I’m doing."
All cliched journey versus destination throw-pillow fodder aside, sometimes a lack of plan is the best kind—and as we’ve seen from his work, can produce stunning results.
Hieu has been a member of the Twin Cities poetry scene since his youth, spent at Central High School with his longtime best friend, the outspoken Danez Smith (winner of the 2015 Lambda Literary Award), who spent his youth haranguing Hieu to go to class, to little avail. (Finding his passion for performance and slam poetry at an early age, Hieu had little interest in school). Among the bottom of his graduating class (but graduating nonetheless!), after high school he received what he describes as a secondhand education in writing and form from his traditionally educated peers (shout out to Michael Mlekoday and Sierra DeMulder in particular).
In other words (his again), his post high school education has been one long independent study, with many publishing credits (including the Indiana Review and Pank), grants (including the Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant from the Loft and the VERVE grant from Intermedia Arts), and accolades to show for it. He is currently an editor with Muzzle, a haberdasher by day, a coach for the Macalester slam poetry team, and a ____ at ___ (this last one is top-secret, but who doesn’t like an opportunity for literary Mad Libs?). Perhaps most importantly, he’s at work on a highly anticipated new collection centered around the theme of leaving.
While his lack of classroom experience makes him feel unconfident as a teacher (something he’s working on), we can learn many things from him, because he’s unabashedly himself. Hieu can teach us the beauty of both confessional poetry and pop culture (he inspired me to have a Bring It On-a-thon). He’s shown us that we can wear Timberwolves jerseys over floral prints. We can mark our love for Harry Potter on our bodies (his first tattoo being the word “Muggle”) while carrying Jason Shinder in our totes. Our GPAs, degrees, and resumes aren’t an indication of what we will contribute to the world. In the spirit of the new year, I asked about his New Year’s resolution, which was to "up [his] kindness level," a seemingly impossible task for one of the most genuinely kind strangers I’ve met. But that’s Hieu; looking for ways to actively practice kindness rather than rest on his passively kind laurels.
To learn more about Hieu and stay up-to-date on his latest forays in the poetry world, follow him on Twitter @hieuminh and hieuminhnguyen.com.
Molly Fuller is the former production editor of Coffee House Press and currently a freelance writer and editor based in Minneapolis. When not working, she can usually be found with her nose in books or crossword puzzles, or wrangling a wild animal someone misleadingly told her was a dog. You can follow Molly on Twitter @tamalebruce.
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Hieu Minh Nguyen
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Hieu Minh Nguyen is a Vietnamese American poet born and raised by a single mother in the Mcdonough Housing Projects in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
His debut collection of poetry, This Way to the Sugar, was a finalist for the Lambda Book Award.[1] His second collection, Not Here, was published in April 2018 by Coffee House Press.[2]
His work has been published in The Journal, PANK, Vinyl, Muzzle, The Paris-American, and Indiana Review.[3]
Nguyen has been a Kundiman fellow, winner of the VERVE grant from Intermedia Arts and the Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant from The Loft Literary Center, and been a recipient of the University of Arizona Poetry Center's Summer Residency.[3] He is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.[4]
He is based in Minneapolis.[5]
Published Works
Books
Not Here, (Coffee House Press, 2018)
This Way to the Sugar, (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014)
QUOTED: "brilliant"
"Nguyen communicates with stunning clarity the ambivalence of shame, how it can
commandeer one's life and become almost a comfort."
8/11/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Not Here
Publishers Weekly.
265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Not Here
Hieu Minh Nguyen. Coffee House, $16.95 trade paper (120p)
ISBN 978-1-56689-509-5
Nguyen (This Way to the Sugar) attempts a courageous exorcism of shame in his brilliant and disquieting
second collection, exposing the baggage of living as a queer person of color in a white-supremacist, classist,
heteronormative society. He illuminates how one can find a home inside self-hate, how "grief can taste of
sugar if you run/ your tongue along the right edge." Nguyen's fearful mother symbolizes the wider world,
her homophobia and internalized racism evident in her response to a picture of his white boyfriend who
"will keep you safe." Nguyen articulates feelings of inadequacy engendered by his mother's judgment in
heartrending detail: "she knelt in front of a shrine & asked// to be blessed with a daughter & here I am: the
wrong/ monster; truck stop prom queen in his dirt gown." Another specter lurks, of Nguyen's memories of
sexual abuse. "Somewhere in this story I am nine years old/ filling the loud hollows with cement to drown
out the ghost," Nguyen writes. And a series of poems titled "White Boy Time Machine" contends with
xenophobia and imperialism: "I look out the window/ & I don't see a sunset, I see a man's// pink tongue
razing the horizon." Nguyen communicates with stunning clarity the ambivalence of shame, how it can
commandeer one's life and become almost a comfort. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Not Here." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 53. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357511/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8258646f.
Accessed 11 Aug. 2018.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357511
QUOTED: "Nguyen’s writing is by turns electrifying and somber, heartrending and triumphant. He packs a devastating amount of emotion into just a few words, and each poem bristles with striking images."
"It is clear from his talent that we will be seeing important work from him for years to come."
BOOKS: 'THIS WAY TO THE SUGAR,' A NEW POETRY COLLECTION BY HIEU MINH NGUYEN
Rachel Rostad
April 4, 2014
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Perhaps my body would make more sense /
if you cut it open.
Hieu Minh
Nguyen’s debut collection of poetry, This
Way To The Sugar, is cannibalistically aware of the blood beneath the skin.
It depicts the body not as a site of comfort, but as a weapon, a haunted house,
a meal. Sex becomes surgery: “later, when he’s pulling out / my spine with
whatever instrument / makes the least amount of noise...” And sex happens in
scenery as memorable as it is isolating: internet chatrooms, hotel rooms, a car
at the bottom of the ocean.
Nguyen writes
about the memories that still haunt long after they’ve been buried, those
twilit half-recollections of childhood. Each section opens with lines from
children’s books that, put in the context of the poems, carry profound, disturbing
meaning. This device is fitting, in a book centered on the reinterpretation of
childhood through the lens of adulthood—those harmless-seeming moments that
gain dark significance once innocence is lost.
This Way To The Sugar agrees with Where The Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, who said: “I
remember my own childhood vividly... I knew terrible things. But I knew I
musn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.” Just so, Nguyen insists on
the concomitance of sexuality and childhood. He depicts a young boy giving his
abusive teacher a peach, which she slurps from his hands. He shows us a
fourteen-year-old, “breath fogging up the computer screen like a wet ghost,”
seducing a forty-three year old man on the internet.
Interwoven with
these themes of memory and sexuality, Nguyen writes of his family, the
“Vietnamese lullaby sung to an empty bed,” and his love for and simultaneous
isolation from his mother. In “Tater Tot Hotdish,” he describes his family’s
displacement and assimilation into white culture: “Vietnam / became a place our
family pitied, a thirsty rat / with hair too dark and a scowl too thick.”
This Way To The Sugar’s genius lies in its careful attention
to intersectionality. It is as much a story about a Vietnamese-American boy as
it is about a queer one. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the poem
“Ladyboy Theater,” which describes a sexual encounter between the narrator and
a white man:
boy lathers
in a tub of saké.
boy fresh
off the poppers.
boy mail
ordered.
boy the
wrong package.
boy dog
collar made from jade.
boy rice
wine enema.
boy napalm
bukakke.
Nguyen’s writing
is by turns electrifying and somber, heartrending and triumphant. He packs a
devastating amount of emotion into just a few words, and each poem bristles
with striking images: “the year guided / by a burning building instead / of a
lighthouse.” It is clear from his talent that we will be seeing important work
from him for years to come.
***
Rachel Rostad is a writer, activist, and
Korean adoptee. If you like what you read, check her out on Facebook
and Twitter.
QUOTED: "Nguyen’s poems brilliantly replay the nightmare of how all traumas are connected; how one trauma leads to another and another and another; and how the abused body, when separate from the self, becomes a possession sometimes precious and sometimes despised, can self-destruct and cease its desire to live. Unlike the title of Nguyen’s book, Not Here, his poetry is very much immediate and alive. And like spirits that cannot be seen but sensed, his words will pass through generations like blood. As a reader, I honor his shadow—a haunting outline, although greater than mine, is still painfully familiar."
BOOK REVIEW: HIEU MINH NGUYEN’S ‘NOT HERE’
Posted on Jun 7, 2018 | Leave a comment
Not Here, by Hieu Minh Nguyen; Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2018.
Reviewed by Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen
Oh, but why am I here?
It seems important to mention all the things
that went wrong:
“White Boy Time Machine: Instruction Manual”
To recognize suffering is the first sign of healing, and the poems of Hieu Minh Nguyen’s most recent book Not Here, published by Coffee House Press, does just that. Through a labyrinth of lyrical ironies we are led on a path of healing, a revealing of the poignancy of absence and the power of words to make the invisible visible.
Nguyen’s first poem “White Boy Time Machine: Instruction Manual” sets the scene and encapsulates the sense of loneliness and isolation one can experience not just without people, but also among people – the circumference of excruciating spaces around and between them. The poetic language, stylistic forms, and symbols used by Nguyen throughout this collection reflect the emotional and spatial relationship of the speaker’s experience of alienation and marginalization as a young, Vietnamese American, gay male, survivor and son of war refugees in the Midwest.
In Not Here the word “and” is substituted exclusively with an ampersand (&), which in itself is a symbol of two letters combined (e and t). This textual slight-of-hand depicts the complexity of being a Vietnamese American, and thus becomes a symbol of displacement and dualities – the bilingual construction of an “other” that is not entirely un-familiar. Nguyen continues this tension of conjunctions and contrasts throughout his reoccurring “White Boy Time Machine” poems (between the human and the unhuman; feeling and unfeeling) through the humming, generic coldness of the white boy time machine and the ethereal pyre of bodies of ash and blood that are, like the speaker of the poems, struggling to be “whole & not a vision with missing limbs.”(“Type II”)
The most exquisite and fierce of Nguyen’s poems, “White Boy Time Machine: Software” is a perfect collision of the themes of the collection itself: the heteronormative, capitalistic consumption and disposal of bodies; sexuality as a commodity to be bartered and exploited; the condoned violence of exoticism; dangers of homophobia outside and within Vietnamese culture; ambiguous ancestry and inherited loss; historical and cyclical abuse of whiteness; childhood trauma and suicide; hope-ful/less-ness and healing. The poem’s form – a stream-of-consciousness montage separated by backslashes – resembles the immediacy of the body’s breath and unacknowledged barriers of assimilation and sexuality, further mirroring the segregating Minnesota landscape and intolerant and intolerable straddling within Vietnamese American families. Like a View-Master, the poem narrates in fragmented still lifes:
“why did you bring me here? / i ask / the machine / has a machine family / who assumes I’ve rigged their boy / to do what i want / by feeding him / a coin / fashioned with a string / a yo-yo organ / is what the doctors called it / when my grandmother’s heart fell out of place / & did not return / return to its country whole / but who ever does / after leaving / the dinner where his parents tick-ticked boring questions at me / but where are you really from? / yesterday is the wrong answer, tomorrow too / despite memory, i believe / in hunger / as a way to pass time / i count the hornets that escape their mouths / for years i lay there & pressed / an ear against the humming / the humming i once mistook for static / until the stingers / rose from metal water i hear my skin sing / in a frequency made only from laughter / when told you speak so well / an aubade that calls to me like a grandfather / clock / the machine reassures me that i have nothing / to prove / i am who they think i am / i lace the corset, tight / blend a decimated village into the hollows / of my cheeks / a dirt burlesque / a virus that breached a fire / wall of family portraits / darkening before the embers / tear through / my future / a year composed of bleached wires / where the rain clouds travel back & forth / on a clothesline / i hang his skin / to dry / i laid / his organs on a bed of rice”
As one continues to read Not Here it is impossible to ignore the strength and maturity of Nguyen’s poetic voice, now bolder and more confident than in his previous book This Way to the Sugar. Nguyen has become a luthier, mastering the art of hollowness, fashioning poetic instruments that skillfully carve emotional space in his readers, where empathy and the strikingly beautiful music of his poetry can resound.
The most resonant example of this “carving” can be experienced in the speaker’s relationship with his mother, and demonstrates how we, as Vietnamese refugees, inherit the fear and language of suffering from our parents that can sometimes be vicious and unforgiving, and how our parents’ words can cut our bodies like bamboo. The pugilistic shell of Nguyen’s poetry is firm yet fragile like a violin’s, and captures the bitter contradictions of a mother’s desire to control and her instinct to protect, while unable to not hurt her child in need. In Nguyen’s poem “Changeling” he writes:
“My mother tells me she is ugly in the same voice
she used to say no woman could ever love you & I watch her
pull at her body & it is mine. My heavy breast.
My disappointing shape. She asks for a bowl of plain broth
& it becomes the cup of vinegar she would pour down my throat.”
The inseparable dissonance of the mother’s voice is translated into an emotional meaning, a cultural tone that is oppressive and harsh in its honesty, which reverberates throughout both of Nguyen’s poetry collections.
Poet Hieu Minh Nguyen. Photo by Michael Lee.
On a similar note, one of Nguyen’s most remarkable gifts, aside from his harmonious arrangements of provocatively ugly language and stunningly gorgeous imagery, is his chilling comprehension of cruelty. Nguyen courageously does not feign ignorance or denial, and his speaker’s ability to pointedly describe the threat of being gay and Vietnamese, the horribleness of his mother, and especially capture the “felt sense and subtle imprints of trauma”* of having been molested and the irrational triggers brought upon by singular details – like a dissociated body – removed from a complete memory, is breathtaking. For example in “Again, Let Me Explain Again”:
“…I want to be better
at lying, or at least, for heaven’s sake, feel a strand
of hair graze my arm without the world around me
turning into an empty classroom, an endless row
of desks, a woman swaying at the end, her face pressed
against the chalkboard, but let me start the story over
for someone once told me that ‘touch’ is too soft
a word to describe what happened to me…”
Nguyen’s poems brilliantly replay the nightmare of how all traumas are connected; how one trauma leads to another and another and another; and how the abused body, when separate from the self, becomes a possession sometimes precious and sometimes despised, can self-destruct and cease its desire to live.
Unlike the title of Nguyen’s book, “Not Here,” his poetry is very much immediate and alive. And like spirits that cannot be seen but sensed, his words will pass through generations like blood. As a reader, I honor his shadow – a haunting outline, although greater than mine, is still painfully familiar.
* From Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body In a Search for the Living Past by Peter A. Levine, PhD
CONTRIBUTOR BIO
Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen is a poet, community artist, activist and educator. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College in Oakland, California where she was awarded the Mary Merrit Henry Prize in Poetry and the Ardella Mills Literary Composition Prize in Creative Non-Fiction. In addition to literary journals and magazines, her publications include AS IS: A Collection of Visual and Literary Works by Vietnamese American Artists and Troubling Borders, An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora. Anh-Hoa has been a working board member of the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) and a creative member of the Vietnamese Artists Collective. Anh-Hoa is the founder of Pomelo Press, and creates self-published and hand bound artists books. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the de Young Museum and Writer-in-Residence at Hedgebrook. Anh-Hoa is a Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA) alumna, Elizabeth George Foundation Fellow, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant winner. She is a scholar for the Minnesota Humanities Center working collaboratively with their “War and Memory” Conversation Series and MN Remembers Vietnam program, and is a presenter for the PBS/MELSA library series called “The Vietnam War: 360.” Anh-Hoa is currently the artist-in-residence for The Floating Library 2018 and is a Lecturer at St. Catherine University.
QUOTED: "They feel at once raw and ruthlessly condensed, as if their first drafts were three times as long. Clichés, redundancies, the sort of details that flesh out a novel, have been sliced away, until even the talkiest prose blocks, those with the cadence of conversation, stand out, word by word."
"variety in form, and intensity of introspection, provides the surprise that Nguyen’s unvarying diction (common words, always) and his inevitable topics cannot."
"Many people have similar troubles, and try to describe them, in prose poems and in verse. But very few could do what Nguyen has done."
A Hard Childhood Compressed Into Poetry, With Concision and Heat
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Hieu Minh Nguyen
By Stephanie Burt
June 18, 2018
Hieu Minh Nguyen begins his concise and unsettling second book of poems with an apology, or an accusation: “It seems important to mention all the things / that went wrong.” And so many things have gone wrong, in Nguyen’s past and in the history of his family. His mother, who came to America from Vietnam, could not prevent his father, also Vietnamese, from abusing them both, emotionally and physically. As a child, he also faced racial hatred: “Boys … chucked rocks at our heads.” The young poet ran away from home. A grade school teacher repeatedly “molested” him, “my naked shape molting green in her hands. … She would find me at Champ’s playground. Even in the summer.” His best friend (whom she did not molest) died very young.
Nguyen kept the abuse, along with his same-sex desires, his crushes on boys, secret into adulthood, in part to protect his mother: “He got married, she reminds me. / Why can’t you?” She accepts his romantic life now, for reasons that might be mixed up with ethnic self-hate: “Because your lover is white, you are forgiven.” “Any love I find will be treason.” At times, the adult writer still sees himself — and imagines his mother seeing him — as monstrous: “truck stop prom queen in his dirt gown,” “grotesque muse / spinning marrow into lace.”
That sense of oneself as a monster, as a problem nobody can solve, governs these pages, and gives them their bitter, terse power. When Nguyen veers from storytelling, he finds disturbing figures for himself: He is “a thing / rummaged / from under a bed,” “a boy who lets the spider crawl onto his face / before smacking it dead.” He cannot stop replaying these parts of his past (as the series of poems called “White Boy Time Machine” suggests): Even to see himself with “a sense of humor … requires enduring / the labor of forgetting.” The poems in “Not Here” feel inevitable as well as painful, full of sentences that Nguyen had no choice but to write.
That said, he has made the right choices about how to write them. They feel at once raw and ruthlessly condensed, as if their first drafts were three times as long. Clichés, redundancies, the sort of details that flesh out a novel, have been sliced away, until even the talkiest prose blocks, those with the cadence of conversation, stand out, word by word: “I can’t stop talking about desire. / I used to think of it as a pane of glass I would press my face against / & then one day it came, one day I fell through.” Other poems look like skinny ribbons, unspooling down the page, or have the rectangular shape, and the segmented structure, of sonnets: variety in form, and intensity of introspection, provides the surprise that Nguyen’s unvarying diction (common words, always) and his inevitable topics cannot.
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Like that other charismatic Minnesotan Danez Smith, Nguyen came to poetry through live performance; his fine first book, “This Way to the Sugar,” appeared from a press (Write Bloody Publishing) strongly associated with spoken word. (Smith is, also, a named character in this book; the poets attend a Twin Cities drag show together.) An earlier generation of spoken word artists composed only for live performance; many did not hold up well on the page. For Nguyen — and for others in his cohort — things are far otherwise. The stage gave him directness and an audience, the page — and his own intellect — a gift for concision. Where he gets his best metaphors, only the gods can know:
In my dreams: I am foolish
holding a torch to a block of ice.
I think we were there, he & I
beneath it. I think we survived.
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Nguyen’s stripped-down style also makes available pithy, saddened advice, almost along the lines of Philip Larkin, whose poems about hating parties, and attending parties anyway, stand behind Nguyen’s decision to show his face at one more wintry gathering, “to live / outside the warm parameters / of my loneliness,” to make himself present “long enough for everyone to notice / when I’m gone.” Such phrases — and the essaylike prose poems that conclude the volume — might leave you wondering whether Nguyen has not only more verse, but a memoir, or a book of essays, in him.
For now, though, the slim frames of poetry serve him well, and the apothegms, the quotable lines, keep coming: “Be grateful that we bury / our dead & not leave them where they died.” “I think the life I want / is the life I have, but how can I be sure?” “I describe your funeral like a party you forgot to attend. It wasn’t the same without you.” It’s hard for Nguyen to look squarely at his past, but harder for him to imagine a future: “I feel furthest from wanting to live when I think of joy as some kind of destination, a two-story house around the corner with a basketball hoop in the driveway.” It’s also hard to calculate the damage we do to one another, and to our children, by implying that we expect just one life course, and will not comprehend or tolerate others; and it’s harder still — not to mention more damaging — to cut yourself off from your past.
If there is one thread that holds together all the desires and fears in this book, it is Nguyen’s need to see himself not just as someone who has survived his experiences but as someone who can represent, or face, them. Nguyen has another quick metaphor, not about love but about his own writing: “Once, I ran, face first, into a mirror / because I didn’t recognize / my reflection, because I didn’t see a reflection at all.” We read poetry (among many other reasons) to see ourselves, and lives like ours, reflected: If you don’t see yourself in the poems you read, you have to write them.
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In an ideal world no one would grow up with the life that Hieu Minh Nguyen has had, and many thousands would have his talents, his compression, his way with figures, his talent for turning harsh memories into elegant verse. In this world, many people have similar troubles, and try to describe them, in prose poems and in verse. But very few could do what Nguyen has done.
STEPHANIE BURT’S most recent collection of poetry is “Advice From the Lights.”
NOT HERE
Poems
By Hieu Minh Nguyen
80 pp. Coffee House. Paper, $16.95.
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QUOTED: "This is Nguyen’s second poetry collection, and it does feel like the work of a young writer. ... There is an edge of clarity and urgency."
"Nguyen’s most striking gift ... is finding moments of almost unbearable emotional pressure inside of the stories he is telling. You could buy this book for its clarity, its intersectionality, the specific truth-seeking which the poet has undertaken. All of those are excellent reasons to buy a book. I would buy it, instead, for its incendiary longing."
Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen (Coffee House Press, 2018)
Reviewed by C. Bain, Staff Book Reviewer
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Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about white desire. Or rather, I’ve been thinking about how my desire, which is white, is not benign. White desire bears the weight and ammunition of history, whether we invite them or not. When a white person is attracted (or ‘fascinated’ or ‘enchanted’ or whatever, I mean, I am a poet unfortunately), to someone who is already tasked with symbolizing the Other, then that desire can potentially replicate their other experiences of being made into objects. So it was timely and rewarding for me, to review Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018.) Although white desire is certainly not the only subject, these poems, with gut-punching emotion and hard-edged beauty, offer maps of the desire-line through that territory. For example, in “Ode to the Pubic Hair Stuck in My Throat,” where Nguyen uses the humorous title and relatable moment as a setup for a serious and beautiful chain of images, we are given the lines:
remind me
what it’s like to speak
without
a white man
flickering in my throat
Or, later, “Mercy,” a heartbreaking accounting of the emotional violence inflicted on the speaker by white sex partners, opens with:
Once, while lying in his bed
a man asked me to quiet
his dog by speaking to it
in Vietnamese, said
well, she is your people
And while the white men in these poems easily do enough to implicate themselves as villains, the poems do not concern themselves with accusing the men. That is, I didn’t feel lectured or antagonized. There is an unavoidable political undercurrent, but the poem isn’t politicized, it’s not polemical, or making an argument that extends from these moments. Rather, the moments themselves are illuminated, and then the speaker turns again towards himself, offering us more questions. I feel a little like I’m apologizing or equivocating about the political weight of this work, and that’s not what I want to do. Maybe I mean that there are poems, (I’m thinking of work by Solmaz Sharif and Layli Long Soldier,) where the poet takes the reader’s hand and escorts them into the politics of the moment. Then there are other poems, like most of Not Here, that arrive at a political truth through a private door. The way the poem rests in our America, our political moment, is for the reader to construct. These windows into the desire, or complicity, of the person faced with white desire are heartbreaking and haunting and all but unique, in my experience as a reader.
But I do not want to lock Not Here into this facet of its subject matter, despite how important and generous it was for me to find these poems. Not Here, as the title suggests, also deals with place, sometimes a high school cafeteria, sometimes an arcing, primordial location where either ancestors or history-stripped boy machines assemble. Nguyen also writes with vitality and grace about the body, about trauma/memory/time, and about family. It is a testament to the unifying passion of the work that poems with this breadth of subject feel like they belong in the same collection. Yet, rather than feeling disparate, Nguyen is able to lead us through the intersections that make these ideas inextricable. In “Lesson,” which introduces us to the speaker’s mother:
… For years we sat in silence
while she prayed & lit candles; asked ancestors to free me
from disease; again, blamed my father, that he taught me nothing
but desire & the desire to kill her—but still, I am surprised
when she turns to me and says, in a language I do not remember
being this soft, Because your lover is white, you are forgiven.
The mother-figure in these poems is painfully rendered. She who refers to the speaker’s white lovers as safety. She who the speaker talks about always translating into English, who the speaker also preemptively eulogizes, to “anticipate this grief by exhausting it / with music.” The mother appears in perhaps my favorite poem of the collection, “Changeling,” lamenting that a medication is making her fat, after she policed the speaker’s childhood weight:
It’s important to mention, I truly wanted to be beautiful
for her. In my dreams I am thin & if not thin, something better.
I tell my mother she is still beautiful & she laughs. The room fills
with flies. They gather in the shape of a small boy. They lead her
back to the mirror, but my reflection is still there.
The mother is just one figure that is written onto the speaker’s body. In fact, in relation to the title, Not Here could refer to the speaker’s body, his selfhood. The body is, in a way, not here, so often is it eclipsed by desire for the other, by its own failures, by memory and traumatic occlusions of memory.
I would be curious to know how Nguyen wants the violent eroticism in his work to be read. It’s one of my weaknesses as a reader, that I read narratives with shocking or excessive sexual force and think to myself, “that sounds nice.” But even correcting for that habit of mind, it seems to me that there is something active, something (if not joyful, at least) blazingly alive in the erotics of this book. The queerness, the striving for love in this book, is active. It is sad, but it is not doomed. It is a connection to life. Even in poems like the sardonically titled “Again, Let Me Tell You What I Know About Trust,” which maps violence between the speaker’s parents onto his adult sexual life, or the harrowing series of hook-up moments in a poem called “Hosting” where Nguyen writes:
… I can’t stop talking about desire,
I used to think of it as a pane of glass I would press my face against
& then one day it came, one day I fell through
the glass or the boy or the men in their many faces
This is Nguyen’s second poetry collection, and it does feel like the work of a young writer. I mean that there is an edge of clarity and urgency (even in pieces with intricate subjects) that reminds me of Sharon Olds’ early work. Nguyen’s most striking gift, for me, is finding moments of almost unbearable emotional pressure inside of the stories he is telling. You could buy this book for its clarity, its intersectionality, the specific truth-seeking which the poet has undertaken. All of those are excellent reasons to buy a book. I would buy it, instead, for its incendiary longing. Not Here does not tell you that it is safe, or right, to want. But it reminds you that for the living, there is no alternative.