“The soul they say has no / gender // Unemployment / estimated at 20%” – Hoa Nguyen, “The Soul They Say”
Have you been enjoying National Poetry Month? Not gonna lie, I’m a little ahead on my reading. Couple that with my amazing experience at Lit For Chicago last Friday, it’s already been one hell of a national poetry month. I don’t know how the next couple of weeks can build on the first couple weeks, have the stakes keep heightening, but then again, who needs it do? This is not Plotted Novel Month. It is Poetry Month. And I have been reading poetry.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week
Two books that I am long overdue to read. Have you ever really loved precisely one book by an author, reading it over and over, loving it, but knowing there is a whole rest of their catalogue out there, and feeling like you don’t actually know what they’re about? Honestly, I do this all the time with bands, too. These two books were worth the wait, and now I love this author even more than I previously did. Two excellent books of poetry, As Long As Trees Last and A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Hoa Nguyen.
As Long As Trees Last by Hoa Nguyen: gotta say, if I was hoping for something relatively similar to Hecate Lochia, this was a great next book to read. Published in 2012, this book absolutely rips. The poems are tight, compact, with Hoa’s unique way of playing with language, inserting mythological figures, and casually referencing parenting in all its silliness and grossness. This style of writing is absolutely aspirational to me, I never feel like my shorter stuff is as powerful and surprising as poetry like Hoa’s. At 69 pages with no poem longer than two pages (and some as short as two stanzas), this is close to the Platonic Ideal of a poetry collection for me. Definitely pick this one up, Wave Books did beautiful work with the design, too.
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Hoa Nguyen: published in 2021, it’s not just the longer length that has me calling this book more ambitious than Hecate Lochia or As Long As Trees Last. This is a book about generational trauma, about lost homelands, about immigration, about more personal loss, about a lot of things. We have guns pointed at mothers working in the rice paddies, we have sarcastic adulations about the U.S. Air Force, we have sober accountings of various terrible developments from Dow Chemical. There’s more anger in this book than the other two, righteously so. If there’s a syllabus of post-Vietnam War literature, this book should goddamn well be on it, right along with The Gangster We Are Looking For and Time Is A Mother. Even with the somewhat heavier material, Hoa maintains a totally distinctive lyric voice that I love. The things she does with language are amazing. No matter the material you’re dealing with, you still have to write a poem, and Hoa Nguyen is one of the best poets alive.
There’s also super sick stuff in here about Hoa’s mom being part of an all-women stunt motorcycle troupe. There are some truly impressive photos in the back of the book, too. There’s a poem of them wowing some European stunt riders, because women weren’t allowed to do rad shit on bikes in 1950s-60s Europe, I guess. It’s not the only example of the kinds of totally unique humanity that gets lost in the destruction of war, but it’s a salient one.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Brendan put me on to EARTHGANG recently. Here’s the unbelievably catchy “Bobby Boucher.”
- This week in ICE: shoulda posted this last week, but here’s H Kapp-Klote at The Chicago 312 on CPD Superintendent Snelling ducking ICE hearings, plus a followup this week. Feds Broke State Law By Targeting People Near Chicago Courts, Public Defender Says by Charles Thrush, Feds Deny Communication With White House Over Broadview Protest Conspiracy Charges by Madison Savedra in Block Club. ICE Officials Now Present At 13 U.S. Airports, Including Cleveland Hopkins International by Eliana Brownell in The Oberlin Review. Figures show ICE arrested more than 800 people after tips from US airport security agency by Ted Hesson in The Independent. Lynn, MA Organizes ICE Resistance by Mitch Gayns in Working Mass. ‘It’s a smack in the face,’ Chicago residents frustrated with police Supt. Larry Snelling about Operation Midway Blitz by Tonia Hill in The Triibe. US seeks to deport Kilmar Ábrego García to Liberia despite new Costa Rica deal, an AP item reposted in The Guardian. Hey, anyone else seen the weird clickbaity shit AP is doing lately?
- For the second time in my adult life, I am happy that the Chicago Bulls fired their front office. Kelly Dwyer has the necessary read on the AK era. In depressing Chicago sports news (is there any other kind?), the Sky traded Angel Reese. As Tom Ley at Defector says, “the Chicago Sky and merit are concepts as distant from each other as Earth and the Moon. This is possibly the worst organization in American pro sports. The Reese trade is a culmination of numerous managerial fuck-ups that have turned the Sky into the clowns of the WNBA.”
- Thought I posted this one, but I guess not. How Brothel Workers in Nevada Just Made Labor History by Kim Kelly in The Nation
- It’s National Poetry Month, let’s read some poetry. Up first, in honor of his contributions to one of the best readings I’ve ever been to, here’s “Carpet Bomb” by Kenyatta Rogers in Poetry
- “Wilt” by Kathleen Rooney in New Ohio Review. Chicago produces the best poets.
What’re you still doing here? Wanna listen to Angine de Poitrine? I certainly have been for the last few days.
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Maybe your customers view you as “just a server” or “just the person folding t-shirts at Pacific Sunwear,” but you are a stunt motorbike rider in your heart, and they can’t take that from you.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris