A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

by Hoa Nguyen

Overview

2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY

A collection inspired by Hoa’s mother, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe, is verse meditation on Vietnam’s diaspora.

Hoa Nguyen’s latest collection is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” and comprises a verse biography on her mother, Diep Anh Nguyen, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. In turns lyrical and unsettling, her poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950268177
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	04/06/2021
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books of poetry, including A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Wave, forthcoming 2021), 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, 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.

Read an Excerpt

REVENGE POEM

Spoiler alert: she drowns and turns

into a bird I turn into my mother

with my cruel quip and absent father

nest 7, 11, or 14 days

The sea loves me as I calm her

her and her withered left side

an opioid song she sings taking C

for a very large cookie and I truly

am the horrible-ist wanting

the oracle to tell me first

to expect the drowning sea

Come lap lap lap back

lap another way back

sags

Skully sag-faced Why build the nest

on the sea when your name means

scree serene

know why the ease time

These are my radiant fur scars

my fur scarf and trinket necklace

with the long brass (tarnished)

chain

Chem-sprayed burn scar

“Strawberries,” he said

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Seeds and Crumbs

Ask about Language As If It Forgets

Naming Assembles You

“Language Points”

Autonomous Song

We Run on Trash Grass

The Flying Motorist Artist

Red She Broke the Cup

Netting (Language Ghost)

Napalm Notes

Learning the Đàn Bầu

Diệp Before Completion

Less Than Slash Three

Tryouts for the Flying Motorist Artist Team, 1958

German Tightrope Acrobat Group Paid a Visit to the Vietnamese Hùng Việt Female Flying Motorist Artist Group

Tones in the Vietnamese Language

Mud Matrix

Why This Haunted Middle and Door Hung with Haunted Girl Bones

from Vogue Magazine 1970

Sing Ding (Ghostly)

Vietnam Ghost Story: High School Clock Tower

Revenge Poem

Red Shoes Girl Song

from On “New Music” (Tân Nhạc): Notes Toward a Social History of Vietnamese Music in the Twentieth Century

Crow Pheasant

Exercise 14

Oxbow Lake

Mother’s River Moon (Traveling with the Traveling Circus, Lower Mekong, 1959)

Notes on Operation Hades

Mexico

Warm Rain

Feast of the First Morning of the First Day

Last Letter

Durian Sonnet

Dang You Then a Dang

Unrelated Future Tense

Editorial Reviews

06/01/2021

Nguyen's newest collection (after Violet Energy Ingots) is primarily a verse biography of her mother, Diêp Anh Nguyên, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troop in the 1950s and '60s. The result is part archival history, as lost letters, photos, and possessions from her mother's life are uncovered, and part historical exploration of Vietnam both before and after the Communist takeover. Amid meditations on Vietnamese music and language there are references to napalm, Operation Hades, and Operation Wandering Soul, providing historical context and insight into the devastation that occurred in the country during the Vietnam War. Ghosts appear throughout, like a purple áo dài ghost haunting the hallways of a high school; their presence expertly furthers the sense of loss and grief. Readers new to Nguyen's poems will find that they as much about the blank spaces as they are about what is written on the page, brilliantly playing on language and conversation itself. VERDICT While the collection feels at times deeply personal, it is also representative of loss as a whole, and readers will find pieces of themselves in this collection while also feeling themselves immersed in Diêp Anh Nguyên's Vietnam. Recommended for all collections.—Sarah Michaelis, Sun Prairie P.L., WI

Library Journal

"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

From the Publisher