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ISBN: 0-9786933-1-0
8" X 5.85"
112 pp.
$15
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On Hecate Lochia
I grow more certain reading Hoa Nguyen's poems that an ethic is to conjure with. Compassionate toward the inadequacies of words, these poems wield language to remix, render, cite, explode, collage, trace, impress, receive, and attend to experience. So we profit, we increase from Nguyen's willingness to orient her practice and her readers toward the dark unknown where to be "one with my skin" is a "drippy" contact, a "fractal life." It is between those infinitesimally small units of the poet's various and voracious attention that a space is conjured, a vast topography that itself gives shape to nothing less than an America where a mother call resounds, generous yet indifferent, inviting us to land ashore, learn again our potential to imagine and to transform. An ethic is to conjure with, free of allegiances or programs, even, and mercifully, of hope. It should not surprise, then, that such spiritual heavy lifting requires a new lever and line. Like many of her contemporaries, Nguyen can adeptly ring the tonal and semantic resonances of various discourses within a single poem. But at their most innovative these poems craft a line that takes shape between and across the lines of print; Nguyen composes with those resonances, with the unsaid. Yet this work is no passive ethic, neither a nihilistic turn toward the vortices of language nor a scholarly search for a definition of categorical good. That vast central plain of Nguyen's American poem opens in the gaps across her phrases and across her acts of attention and leaves us there, free to to inhabit being as a verb, to be a network of forceful and definitive acts always and at once.
- Farid Matuk
Unique and familiar, open, strong and vulnerable, observant, and oh so refreshing-- Hoa Ngyuen's liberating spirit and breath shows us a world can really happen in a poem, in poetry.
- Joanne Kyger
How's she get it onto the page? the "real lemon," sour-sweet, and a roaring in my ears. She peels apart the house and garden so I see the money globe. Space scores Hoa's poems and inserts them into time. Her spaces resemble connecting canyons, arroyos, that threaten to rush full in a storm -- they are capacious enough to handle the emotion (mine) that rises to meet the poem.
- Cathy Wagner
In Hoa’s Nguyen’s Hecate Lochia tutelary spirits and local elements find their articulation in the found object-poems of a ritualized domesticity. These poems track with immediacy the various roles and pressures—of motherhood, marriage, keeping house, work and writing—that become the occasions in which to celebrate the phenomenal world.
Hoa rejects the poem as machine and instead strives for a more organic poem. She doesn’t privilege one insight or encounter over another, thereby conferring upon the work a democratic value rarely seen. By turns intimate & generous, political & sexy, humorous & sharp-edged, she tracks the quotidian and makes of it not only her story but ours as well. Their energy is outward.
- Roger Snell