A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Hoa Nguyen
2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY
A collection inspired by Hoas mother, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe, is verse meditation on Vietnams diaspora.
Hoa Nguyens latest collection is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-Fall-of-Saigon and comprises a verse biography on her mother, Diep Anh Nguyen, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. In turns lyrical and unsettling, her poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts.