A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

From the podcast Cascadian Prophets, an interview with Hoa Nguyen on A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure.

“Nguyen’s unique poetics […] opens into a mosaic of narratives that move between her own life, her mother’s, and mythic realms where the dislodged ghosts of unrealized futures and cultural pasts speak and insist their presence”

Hoa Nguyen on photographs, her mother's past with the motorcycle circus, and the quiet ways to talk to ghosts.

“Her writing’s concision, its general lack of narrative, its refusal of standard forms, its gaps and pauses are all ways of interrupting the flow of experience and, more importantly, the conventions and directives—the normative ideologies—embedded within this flow…”

“I was interested in non linearity and a-chronistic time: time as a process, and time folding over onto itself, obscuring and revealing.”

Sing Forward Again: A Conversation with Hoa Nguyen

"I think that my poetry is a way to sing forward again, to sing that beingness, untied from injury or despite injury."

“Song is removed from the domain of the beautiful and resituated to do multidimensional memory work.”— Patrick Flanery

Angeline Kek reviews A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

Interview - Circling the Distance: A Conversation with Hoa Nguyen

“This rain reminds me of rain”: Contemplating the Archive in Hoa Nguyen’s A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Kim Jacobs-Beck

Remarkable not only for its unrelenting evisceration of clichés about Vietnam and its people, but also for the variety of forms in which this re-visioning is told

“She offers us these songs of her mother, complete with her own investigations of language as both subject and practice.”

Hoa Nguyen reads “Seeds and Crumbs” from her poetry collection A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, published in April 2021 by Wave Books.

The ambitious fifth entry from Nguyen (Violet Energy Ingots) combines ghosts (a word that appears repeatedly in the titles of these poems) and language: “You lose every other/ word.” Here, word is synonymous with family and homeland. Woven throughout is a biography in verse of Nguyen’s mother, Diê.p Anh Nguyê˜n, whose presence amplifies the book’s longing, allowing it to act as a kind of testimony.

What is a divinatory poetics? Can texts be haunted? This week, Toronto-based poet Hoa Nguyen dives into the narratives that prompted and sit within her new book of poetry, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure.

“Remarkable not only for its unrelenting evisceration of clichés about Vietnam and its people, but also for the variety of forms in which this re-visioning is told”

A micro-interview with Hoa Nguyen.
“The book is inspired by many things; primarily, a desire to center Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic experiences. I wrote to contest degrading images and roles and other monoliths of identity assigned to women of Asian descent in North America.”

Featured in “2021 Poetry for the Rest of Us”
"Selected among the most exciting and necessary collections of 2021"

4 Questions with Hoa Nguyen, Author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure.

“I was thinking through what it means “to document” to relate from memory. I was also looking into the history of Vietnamese music, especially the monochord of Vietnam, the đàn bầu.”

Listen to 'In Conversation With a Poet - Hoa Nguyen' at The Poetry Extension.