Violet Energy Ingots

(Hardback)

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"What our lives permit us to perceive as givens, Nguyen reveals as mere conditions, inextricably tied to and guided by greater forcesfrom the economy to the environment, from the Mayan predictions to the menstrual cycle, from the weight of history to the burden of the future." Michael Brodeur, The Boston Globe

The poems in Violet Energy Ingots contain a sense of dis-ease, rupture, things frayed, and griefas love shimmers the edges. Ryo Yamaguchi describes Nguyens writing as a kind of stuttering with intelligences, impressions, and emotions flaring up as the words find their pathways. As grounded in the earth as in the stars, her poems are reminders of the possibilities of contemplation in every space and moment.

A Brief History of War

And what if Jupiter
is your faith

a balloon
but I call you

by the improper
names I'm stained

by the world here
To be brave and endure

the losingTo be brave
and be the losing

LuckBrutal

Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, DC 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 fourteen years. She is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and As Long as Trees Last. She lives in Toronto, Ontario where she curates a reading series and teaches poetics privately and at Ryerson University.

Reviews

"What our lives permit us to perceive as givens, Nguyen reveals as mere conditions, inextricably tied to and guided by greater forces--from the economy to the environment, from the Mayan predictions to the menstrual cycle, from the weight of history to the burden of the future." --Michael Brodeur, The Boston Globe "Hoa Nguyen's poems probe dailiness to divorce us from our base assumptions about how language might present the world to us. Her poems are also funny, and they strangely develop their own language games which comprise some of the most inviting lyrics I've found in a living poet." --Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Bookslut "[Hoa Nguyen's poems] impart a sense of how one might look at the various parts of a life and let them speak out without settling into simple dichotomies." --American Poets "Nguyen makes poetry that sticks in the heart and the craw, and she deserves to be widely and aggressively read." --Seth Abramson, Huffington Post "Nguyen remains one of the most powerful, vivid, and even visceral contemporary poets working today." --Dan Shewan, The Rumpus "[I]n her spare, wry way she's such a careful observer that the reader feels immersed in life's most quotidian details, its hurts, and rocky hopes." --Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Author Bio

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 of 14 years. She is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and As Long as Trees Last. She lives in Toronto, Ontario where she curates a reading series and teaches poetics privately and at Ryerson University.