Hoa Nguyen
Photo by Waylon Hart
Biography
Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books including Red Juice: Poems 1998 - 2008 and the Griffin Prize nominated Violet Energy Ingots. Her latest collection of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure is the winner of the Canada Book Award and finalist for a 2021 National Book Award and the General Governor’s Literary Award for Poetry among other notices of merit. A well-regarded and popular teacher of creative writing, Hoa lives in Tkaronto with her family where she serves as a Visiting Practitioner for the Faculty of Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University and a mentor for writers as part of the graduate programs at Guelph University and the University of Toronto. She is member of She Who Has No Masters, a Vietnamese and South East Asian diasporic transnational collective of cis, trans, and non-binary women/womyn, and founding mentor of the SWHNM mentorship. In 2019, her body of work was nominated for a Neustadt Prize for Literature, a prestigious international literary award often compared with the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Poetics Statement
“Poems poem with difference and repetition, with visible variation, are frames that move and reframe. They are places of quotation and intertextuality. Poems can feature obscured histories and discourses or invoke the oldest stories we know.
Poems assemble acts of attention and trouble the subject/ object separation of Western philosophy and world view.
Hologrammatic, poems are sourced in memory, speech, and books. They draw upon language held in commons and attend to folk and pop culture. Poems elaborate, borrow, and recycle. Poems place alongside, expresslanguage’s performative possibilities, create coherences.
Poems move inside architectures of meaning.
Poems conjure worlds, relate to mythic imagination, create new psycho-geographies, and define and redefine spatial relationships. The language of poetry is that of play, structurality, resonance, hey nonny nonny.
A poem is the mutability of language in motion.
Poems are acts of composition and decomposition. With a poem we can shape story into new relationships and new meaning making. Poems make solid a narrative not possible before, where ‘the real’ may be attached to words or image as relational.
Poems enrich perspectives. Poems can move directionally from inside out, from outside in, can declare a way out, allow passage, release form.
Poems can speak the unsaid and silenced. ”
Sample of Poet's Work
Haunted Sonnet
Haunt lonely and find when you lose your shadow
secretive house centipede on the old window
You pronounce Erinys as “Air-n-ease”
Alecto: the angry Magaera: the grudging
Tisiphone: the avenger (voice of revenge)
“Women guardians of the natural order”
Think of the morning dream with ghosts
Why draw the widow’s card and wear the gorgeous
Queen of Swords crown Your job is
to rescue the not-dead woman before she enters
the incinerating garbage shoot wrangle silver
raccoon power Forever a fought doll
She said, “What do you know about Vietnam?”
Violet energy ingots Tenuous knowing moment.
From Violet Energy Ingots, 2017
Cold Sore Lip Red Coat
What if I ate too much food there being
Not enough money immigranty
And save all the ketchup
packets George
Carlin record on the record player saying
how many ways you can curse and they
are all funny (small brown bird with a black
neck and a beak full of fluff for a nest)
The old joke: “How many feet
do you have?” Instead of
“How tall are you?”
This looks like joy a joke
who looked at you and laughed
Look at the map upside down so that south
Is north and north is south
it’s the other
way around because it’s the commonly agreed to
thing (visual language of the colonizer) or
snowful awful tearful wishful
From A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, 2021
Dang You Then a Dang
And trip me up
a startled robbed way
Dreamt a burnt stump
for a tongue
Ash-haired girl
Cowbell girl
The white American
Veteran said Children
like you played
in the garbage
(Leftovers)
She said “I left my ease here”
heavy trays trick knee
The trick of the model
minority ( a favored
yet shitty condition )
We rung up the diction-tones
to be proud we were
“I threw you away”
and old skins shed
as a Silver Snake (1941)
Sweet toddler on the
crook of her hip
From A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, 2021