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.

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 ¿àn B¿u

Di¿p 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 Vi¿t 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 Nh¿c): 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