AFTER THE MURDER BALLAD
Bringing some other fine things
hard full life atoms springing
No money No fine things
Flatteringly we are the cave
It will be OK in disgrace
She jumped Came to the river
deep water Thou restless ungathered
orphan Tell me your mind
to mend to drown you in despair
Let me sing gone
If I can live kicked & choked
Turned around in deep water
powerful, vivid, and even visceral
Dan Shewan
Tells of the Crackling reveals love in its lost and often fragmentary forms. It sifts through rivers and blue explosions with a “yell of living.” How can we attempt to retrieve the irretrievable through language?
Hoa Nguyen is the author of the chapbook Tells of the Crackling (UDP) and several books, including As Long As Trees Last (Wave), Red Juice (Wave), and Violet Energy Ingots (Wave), which was nominated for a 2017 Griffin Prize for poetry. Based in Toronto, she teaches poetics at several universities and in a popular, long-running private workshop.
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
[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.
Academy of American Poets
Nguyen remains one of the most powerful, vivid, and even visceral contemporary poets working today.
Dan Shewan
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.
Rob McLennan
Chapbook
Hand-bound. 4.5 x 8 in
Publication Date: July 01 2015
Distribution: Direct Only