What if I ate too much food there beingnot enough money immigrantyand save all the ketchup packets GeorgeCarlin record on the record playerof how many ways to curse and theyare all funny (small brown bird with a blackneck and a beak full of fluff for a nest) The old joke: “How many feetdo you have?” instead of“How tall are you?”This looks like joy a jokewho looked at you and laughedLook at the map upside down so that southis north and north is south it’s the otherway around because it’s the commonly agreed tothing (visual language of the colonizer) orsnowful awful tearful wishful
Cold Sore Lip Red Coat
Hoa Nguyen
Feature Date
- September 23, 2021
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“Cold Sore Red Lip Coat” from A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure.
Copyright 2021.
Printed with permission of the author and Wave Books.
Photo:
Waylon Smith
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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