Hoa Nguyen's poems probe dailiness to divorce us from our base assumptions about how language might present the world to us. Her poems comprise some of the most inviting lyrics I've found in a living poet.--Bookslut
Phrase by phrase Nguyen's work can be conversational, playful, funny, angry, acutely self-aware, and loaded with sensory information.--Anselm Berrigan, from the introduction
Red Juice represents a decade of poems written roughly between 1998 and 2008, previously only available in small-run handmade chapbooks, journals, and out-of-print books. This collection of early poems by Vietnamese American poet Hoa Nguyen showcases her feminist ecopoetics and unique style, all lyrical in the post-modern tradition.
[BUDDHA'S EARS ARE DROOPY TOUCH HIS SHOULDERS]
Buddha's ears are droopy touch his shoulders
as scarves fly out of windows and I shriek
at the lotus of enlightenment
Travel to Free Street past Waco
to the hole in the Earth
wearing water
I'm aiming my mouth
for apple pie
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. She is the author of eight poetry books and chapbooks and lives in Toronto, Ontario, where she teaches poetics at Ryerson University and curates a reading series.
About the Author: 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 where she earned an MFA. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including As Long as Trees Last (Wave Books, 2012), Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey Press, 2009), and Your Ancient See Through (Subpress, 2002). Her poetry has been collected in eight anthologies including Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sound: The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose (City Lights, 2009), The Best of Fence (Fence Books, 2009), For the Time Being: A Bootstrap Anthology (Bootstrap Books, 2008), Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008), and Not for Mothers Only (Fence Books, 2007). With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a small press journal of poetry and poetics. From Austin, TX, their home of fourteen years, the poets published contemporaries such as Amiri Baraka, Alice Notley, Linh Dinh, Kenward Elmslie, and Eileen Myles. Nguyen currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, where she curates a reading series and teaches poetics privately and at Ryerson University.
