from A Thousand Micro Reviews
NOTE sent to poet-translator-scholar Vi Khi Nao and students enrolled in her course “Studies in Poetry: Contemporary Vietnamese Poets” at the University of Colorado Boulder:
Dear All,
Thank you for your time and attention to Treasure. I am so moved— and also LOL’d — thanks for seeing the joyride in Time I intended it to be, amid the Tower or Wall. THANK YOU, a thousand times, for your kind words and collaborative collection // of // micro review responses to the book. It becomes poem-like, the best kind of readerly response. And also, fyi: the title is drawn from hexagram 51, an outcome I drew three times consecutively when I sat down to begin writing the poems that became this book. The changing line was actually a HUNDRED thousand times you lose your treasure, but I decided that was just too many times.
Thank you, Vi, for featuring A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure in your literature course. How incredible; also I love this: "Poetry as an ice-sculpture in the desert (paraphrased from Vi)" (!). Thank you for letting me share it here on my site.
Yours,
Hoa
from A Thousand Micro Reviews
Composed by students as a class collaboration in Vi Khi Nao’s course “Studies in Poetry: Contemporary Vietnamese Poets” at the University of Colorado Boulder, written in the spirit of the She Who Has No Masters collective, and formed in response to Hoa Nguyen’s A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure.
495. “bebop de bebop boom” (42)
496. Figures risen from mud.
497. Generational.
498. Born from deep consideration.
499. Photographic.
500. A review in review of myself as I view my self through the self of ancestors still becoming.
501. This book is becoming.
502. Does speaking imbue the world with ghosts?
503. “thankful pleasing” (27)
504. Do motorcycles leave ghosts behind too?
505. I read this on a Saturday over coffee and a muffin.
506. Composition, arrangement, collection.
507. There are just the right number of poems in here.
508. Tales as tall as time.
Read the full review here.