Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, TX, their home for 14 years. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and As Long As Trees Last. She lives in Toronto, Ontario where she teaches poetics privately and at Ryerson University, Bard College, and Miami University.
Hoa Nguyen is a judge for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Judges’ Citation
Hoa Nguyen’s poems tread delicately but firmly between the linear demands of narrative and syntax on the one hand and between registers of speech and forms of address on the other.
Selected poems
by Hoa Nguyen
Make heart-shaped cakes
for the Queen of Heaven
Things that make you cry:
Geode stone pulse
That plant named wizard’s herb
When the state of Michigan sells
“pristine treaty-protected land”
to make a limestone mine
I dreamt the spider crossed
my eye and I crushed it
into my eye Why is the first
day the hardest day? The city
susurrus Are us especially
if you get to keep the money
Copyright © 2016 Hoe Nguyen
Digressive Parenthesis
Wasps out of the birdhouse
for spring my boys shook
out the dead wasps
New fly west
New fly west
for spring? To sip it?
Little gatherings of birds
Why does this feel like weeping?
(snowdrops)
My friends we love
It is two kinds of lost
that I’m lost in
Copyright © 2016 by Hoa Nguyen
First Flowers
Haunt lonely and find when you lose your shadow
secretive house centipede on the old window
You pronounce Erinyes 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 chute wrangle silver
raccoon power Forever a fought doll
She said, “What do you know about Vietnam?”
Violet energy ingots Tenuous knowing moment
Copyright © 2016 by Hoa Nguyen
Haunted Sonnet
January long light
Janus I see you
God of locks and doorways
two-faced looking in Capricorn
Capricious like the snowy owl
irruption
We fear heavy body collisions
January time of doors
time looking back on itself
God of gates
spelt and salt
They say when you
walk through a door
you can forget what
you came for
Copyright © 2016 by Hoa Nguyen, Violet Energy Ingots, Wave Books