As Long As Trees Last

by Hoa Nguyen

"[Nguyen] shares such a streetwise feminism, keeping the edge and making it something you can dance to."—The Poetry Project

Clear-eyed and grounded, Hoa Nguyen performs a hook and snare on what it means to be a twenty-first century human in the nearly ego-less space of these chiseled yet spacious poems.

It's not a time to run
I wear soft shoes
and it took a long time
to walk here

Hoa Nguyen is the co-founder of Skanky Possum. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Genres: Poetry

69 pages, Paperback

First published September 11, 2012

About the author

Hoa Nguyen [(Vĩnh Long, 1967)] was born in the Mekong Delta, grew up in the DC area and studied poetics in San Francisco. She is the author of 8 books and chapbooks, most recently Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey, 2009), Kiss a Bomb Tattoo (Effing Press, 2009) and Chinaberry (Fact Simile, 2010). Based in Austin, TX, Hoa curates a reading series and leads a creative writing workshop.

Reviews

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Using cotton panties / for a bookmark.

[juch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rly sweet, not saccharine, calm, like drinking a sharp tea. Read while outdoors

[Jai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoa Nguyen’s As Long As Trees Last is not a book for the city. Shouting concrete and signal siren screech, emit exhaust, make it difficult to “string and feel // wind of wing beats / in your face” (1). Take these poems into the grove and let the “trees be the church” (32). What you have reads like the diary of a hapa witch, a cross-section of all seasons. The shortness of line and breath in Nguyen’s work makes for ritual incantations in a forest clearing, for songs for invasive seeds.

READ MORE AT LANTERN REVIEW: http://www.lanternreview.com/blog/201...

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peril. And love. This book is a perfect example of exactly why we write poems at all.

[Rebecca Valley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite of her collections, but some perfect lines that make it worth reading, absolutely

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jarring, surreal collection musing on Vietnamese identity and history, communion with nature and global geopolitical and economic crises... some references to Greek myth and to other language poets like Jack Spicer, as well as some feminist musings woven into all the above. Quite experimental and a bit hard-to-place at times but has some great poems including "Unused Baby," "Medusa Poem" and "Swell".

[Nicholas Forman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hit and miss. Pretty polar

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to love these more than I did. The sonnets worked best for me--probably because they had just a little more connective tissue. Otherwise, I mostly felt kind of out to sea.