Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books of poetry, including A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Wave, forthcoming 2021), As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice, and Violet Energy Ingots, which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. 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. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Nguyen has lived in Canada since 2011.

• CONTENTSSeeds and CrumbsAsk about Language As If It ForgetsNaming Assembles You“Language Points”Autonomous SongWe Run on Trash Grass The Flying Motorist ArtistRed She Broke the CupNetting (Language Ghost)Napalm NotesLearning the Đàn BầuDiệp Before Completion Less Than Slash ThreeTryouts for the Flying Motorist Artist Team, 1958German Tightrope Acrobat Group Paid a Visit to the Vietnamese Hùng Việt Female Flying Motorist Artist GroupTones in the Vietnamese LanguageMud MatrixWhy This Haunted Middle and Door Hung with Haunted Girl Bonesfrom Vogue Magazine 1970Sing Ding (Ghostly)Vietnam Ghost Story: High School Clock TowerRevenge PoemRed Shoes Girl Songfrom On “New Music” (Tân Nhạc): Notes Toward a Social History of Vietnamese Music in the Twentieth Century Crow PheasantExercise 14Oxbow LakeMother’s River Moon (Traveling with the Traveling Circus, Lower Mekong, 1959)Notes on Operation HadesMexicoWarm RainFeast of the First Morning of the First DayLast Letter Durian SonnetDang You Then a DangUnrelated Future Tense

"I come back to Hoa Nguyen’s poems all the time and every single time I find a new world of meaning"—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, PEN America