06 Apr Why This Haunted Middle and Door Hung with Haunted Girl Bones by Hoa Nguyen
fringe on Flanders Avenue She’ll die
here by choice ashes in the backyard
not in a circular cement bomb shelter for one
Go into your tree roll on a rabbit fur blanket
refuse to eat for thirty days plus ten days
Unremembered does it matter
misremembering the baby she lost a different baby
(unborn never born the unnamed)
This rain reminds me of rain
I cleaned the pain but smell it on floorboards
of a Ford Fiesta maybe need to burn effigies
powder puff French cosmetics
and perfumes the tortoiseshell hairbrush father
gave her in Saigon “My Butterfly” he wrote
in the long lost This is a clichéd test
stuff the alarm clock in my bag Clouds
and black in the afternoon (untranslatable)
About the Poet
Born in the lower Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington D.C. area, Hoa Nguyen is a poet and educator teaching creative writing and poetics at Toronto Metropolitan University.
The author of six books of poetry, Nguyen’s titles include Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008 (Wave Books, 2014), Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books, 2016) and A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Wave Books, 2021). She is the 2024 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art.
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.
This poem appears in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure.
Related Event
- Hoa Nguyen will join poets Dale Martin Smith, Buffalo’s own Aaron Lowinger, and David Hadbawnik in the first major reading at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 17 at the new location of Fitz Books and Waffles on 1462 Main St. in Buffalo. David Hadbawnik, who is curating the reading, will be returning to Buffalo to read for the first time in the decade since he completed his PhD in the UB Poetics Program.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.