Review of Red Juice by rob mclennan
"Throughout Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008, Nguyen’s poems are composed entirely of presence, of articulating a series of particular moments in which the narrator/author are entirely present, whether the classroom, the kitchen, the bedroom or the yard, as well as in the far-larger scope of the world. In his introduction to the collection, poet and critic Anselm Berrigan describes Nguyen’s poems thusly: “Immediately apparent inside Nguyen’s poetry, to me at least, was a command of voice as an ongoing structural phenomenon, built through diction and velocity while giving off an implicit belief in the agency of a life and the agency of a poem, at once.”