Hoa Nguyen

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Hoa Nguyen is a Vietnamese American poet and educator born in Vĩnh Long in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta to a Vietnamese mother who was a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman circus troupe and an American father who abandoned the family prior to her birth. Growing up in the Washington D.C. area, Nguyen first discovered her connection to poetry when she read an anthology of Vietnamese poetry translated into English at the local library. Through her adolescence and high school, she wrote poetry, but she didn’t allow herself to take it seriously until her 20s. After earning a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland and preparing to apply to a master’s program in social work, the death of a friend and the eulogy she wrote and gave at her funeral inspired her to make the most of her life by following her passion and claiming her life as a poet; she would go on to earn her MFA in poetics from the New College of California in San Francisco. Nguyen’s poetry grapples heavily with the Asian American experience—as well as the experience of being mixed—and seeks to challenge stereotypical depictions of Asian women in popular culture. Nguyen has authored six full collections of poetry and over a dozen chapbooks. She has lived in Toronto, Ontario since 2011 and teaches poetics at Ryerson University.

 

Photo Credit: Waylon Hart

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 [  ] 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

Published:

2017

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Identity

Intersectionality & Culture

Literary Devices:

Dialogue

conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie

Varied Punctuation

diverse use of punctuation.