Hoa Nguyen
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Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books of poetry, including A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Wave Books, 2021); which is the winner of the Canada Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award; As Long As Trees Last; Red Juice; and Violet Energy Ingots, which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. As a public proponent and advocate of contemporary poetry, she has served as guest editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2018 and judge for the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry, and she has performed and lectured at numerous institutions, including Princeton University, Bard College, Poet’s House, and the Banff Centre’s Writers Studio. Recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize and a 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature nomination, she has received grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her writing has garnered attention from such outlets as The PBS News Hour, Granta, The Walrus, New York Times, and Poetry, among others. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Nguyen has lived in Canada since 2011.
(Author photo by Karen Thomson) -
Reviews
I come back to Hoa Nguyen’s poems all the time and every single time I find a new world of meaning.
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, PEN America
Nguyen’s commitment to writing the everyday, the (auto)biographical, the political, and the environmental, often in complex constellations, has given us a suite of collections and chapbooks of singular voice. She operates within a lyric mode that moves fluidly across confession, playful linguistic experiment, and collage, with political investment often in view.
—Patrick Flanery, Chicago Review
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.
—Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Bookslut
[Hoa Nguyen's poems] impart a sense of how one might look at the various parts of a life and let them speak out without settling into simple dichotomies.
—American Poets
Nguyen makes poetry that sticks in the heart and the craw, and she deserves to be widely and aggressively read...
—Seth Abramson, Huffington Post
Nguyen remains one of the most powerful, vivid, and even visceral contemporary poets working today.
—Dan Shewan, The Rumpus
Reviews of books by Hoa Nguyen
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
Violet Energy Ingots
Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008
As Long As Trees Last
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- Hoa Nguyen's website & blog
- Nguyen on a Fact-Simile Poet Trading Card!
- Profile of Nguyen by Amy Carlberg
Poems
-Two poems from A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (in the Brooklyn Rail)
-Essay on the poetic process and revision, including two poem drafts from A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (in Underbelly)
-Two poems (in Saigoneer)
-Two poems (in The Puritan)
-Four Poems (in The Brooklyn Rail)
-“Ficus Carica Sonnet” (in Academy of American Poets)
-“Narrative Poem…” (in Carte Blanc)
-“Cold Sore Lip Red Coat” (in PoetryNow)
- "Dang You Then a Dang" (in Poetry)
- “Strummer” (in Talisman)
- Two poems (in Granta)
- Several poems (on Poets.org)
- “How The Sun Shivers” (in The Rusty Toque)
- “For the Pisces Full Moon” (in Summer Stock)
- “Angel Going Pow” (on Dusie)
- Two poems (on Pen America)
- Three poems (in Eleven Eleven Journal)
- “Unused Baby” (on The Poetry Foundation)
- Three poems (in the Los Angeles Review of Books)
- Five poems (in The Brooklyn Rail)
- Four poems from Red Juice (in tender)
- “Do I Plunge” (on Lit Hub)
Interviews
- The Walrus, with Michael Prior
- Jacket2, with Stephen McLaughlin
- Bookslut, with Joshua Marie Wilkinson
- Open Book Toronto, with James Lindsay
- Kirkus Reviews, with Jessa Crispin
- Poetry and Pho: Hoa Nguyen shares Lyricism and a Recipe, with Paul Maziar
- Evening Will Come, with Alexandra Mathieu
- Washington State Magazine, with Angela Sams
- BOMBLOG, with Iris Cushing
- Gesture, with Brenna Lee
- The Public, with Keven Thurston
- Traces: Hoa Nguyen, with Project 40 Collective -
Audio
- Reading in response to works by Miho Dohi for the Renaissance Society
- Reading "Cold Sore Lip Red Coat" for PoetryNow at the Poetry Foundation
- Lecture “Living Room” for the Bagley Wright lecture series on teaching creative writing
- Reading “No Sleep” for PBS NewsHour
- Reading “They Sell You What Disappears” for PBS NewsHour
- Reading “Never Seen” and “Rage Sonnet” for PBS NewsHour
- Four readings at PennSound
- Interviewed with Dale Smith for Jacket2
Video
- Reading at the Poetry Project with Jesse Seldess:
Hoa Nguyen reads from her work at Counterpath:
