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.

[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.

Nguyen remains one of the most powerful, vivid, and even visceral contemporary poets working today.

The thirty-some pages of short lyrics in Tells of the Crackling continue Nguyen’s work in the small, personal moment, presenting a series of narratives presented in halting breaths, pauses and precise descriptions. Her cadences are marvelous, and constructed entirely for the sake of attention.