That’s when I decided that I needed to claim my life as a poet. And standing in front of a large group of grieving family and friends and speaking what I had written on love and loss allowed me to understand the incredible transformative power of words.
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The experience made me realize that I needed to make the most of this life even if it meant risk and failure. The collective grief was a horrible roar. When I told June that I was thinking about applying for a Masters in Social Work-my attempt at being practical-she asked, “Why not get an MFA in writing?” I put the thought aside as unworkable until several months later, just before Christmas, when a young woman I worked with, a friend, died in a fatal car accident. I knew from watching my mother’s life how hard it was to have a career in the service industry.
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At the time, I was working as a bartender trying to figure out my next move. I took poetry workshops as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland and after earning my degree in Psychology, I enrolled in a workshop at the Bethesda Writers Center at the encouragement of poet friend June Coleman Magrab. I think I always wrote poems, but I didn’t claim my life as a poet until in my mid twenties. Nguyen remains one of the most powerful, vivid, and even visceral contemporary poets working today.When I was maybe 12, I discovered an anthology of Vietnamese poetry translated into English in my public library called A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry. The first line from the introduction read something like, “The Vietnamese people have always considered themselves poets” and it unlocked something in me and granted me a kind of permission to write poetry.
![hoa nguyen hoa nguyen](https://www.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/styles/half_16_9_1440/public/images/2017/09/CxpCRmjRhfSxsXByBHjv.jpg)
Nguyen makes poetry that sticks in the heart and the craw, and she deserves to be widely and aggressively read. 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. 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. Hoa Nguyen's poems probe dailiness to divorce us from our base assumptions about how language might present the world to us. She operates within a lyric mode that moves fluidly across confession, playful linguistic experiment, and collage, with political investment often in view. Nguyen’s commitment to writing the everyday, the (auto)biographical, the political, and the environmental, often in complex constellations, has given us a suite of collections and chapbooks of singular voice. I come back to Hoa Nguyen’s poems all the time and every single time I find a new world of meaning. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Nguyen has lived in Tkaronto since 2011. Recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize and a 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature nomination, her writing has garnered attention from such outlets as The PBS News Hour, Granta, The Walrus, New York Times, CBC Books, and Poetry, among others.
![hoa nguyen hoa nguyen](https://www.umass.edu/englishmfa/sites/default/files/styles/sq300/public/store/img/event/hoanguyen.jpg)
Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books of poetry, including A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Wave Books, 2021), the winner of the Canada Book Award and a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, National Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award As Long As Trees Last Red Juice and Violet Energy Ingots, which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination.