Why This Haunted Middle and Door Hung with Haunted Girl Bones
Yellow and pink comforter ending in pom-pomfringe on Flanders Avenue She’ll diehere by choice ashes in the backyardnot in a circular cement bomb shelter for oneGo into your tree roll on a rabbit fur blanketrefuse to eat for thirty days plus ten days Unremembered does it mattermisremembering the baby she lost a different baby(unborn never born the unnamed) This rain reminds me of rainI cleaned the pain but smell it on floorboardsof a Ford Fiesta maybe need to burn effigiespowder puff French cosmeticsand perfumes the tortoiseshell hairbrush fathergave her in Saigon “My Butterfly” he wrotein the long lost This is a clichéd teststuff the alarm clock in my bag Cloudsand black in the afternoon (untranslatable)
Feature Date
- February 28, 2022
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
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“Why This Haunted Middle and Door Hung with Haunted Girl Bones” from A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure.
Copyright 2021.
Printed with permission of the author and Wave Books.
Waylon Smith
Hoa Nguyen is author of several books of poetry including Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and Violet Energy Ingots. A poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon”, her most recent title, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, was selected for the longlist of the National Book Award 2021. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Hoa lives in Tkaronto with her family.
Seattle, Washington
"'I rename myself a bell to ring,' Nguyen writes, and that bell rings with impressive tonal and melodic versality throughout her work. This dense collection, rife with the life of the body, is proof of what language can bear witness to, a testament Nguyen makes wholly her own."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Nguyen's latest tells the story of Diệp Anh Nguyễn, the author's mother and a daredevil motorcyclist whose portrait — seductively and maniacally posing on her bike — appears at the beginning of the collection. An investigation of mothers and motherlands, devilry and diaspora, this book chronicles her mother's story but delivers almost nothing in the way of facts or events. Nguyen pulls off a paradox, a biography composed of gestures, the sort of thing that could only happen in poetry."
—NPR
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