Violet Energy Ingots

By Hoa Nguyen

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• The poems in Violet Energy Ingots contain a sense of dis-ease, rupture, things frayed, and grief—as love shimmers the edges. Ryo Yamaguchi describes Nguyen’s writing as “a kind of stuttering with intelligences, impressions, and emotions flaring up as the words find their pathways.” As grounded in the earth as in the stars, her poems are reminders of the possibilities of contemplation in every space and moment.
  
  Listed in the top poetry books of fall 2016 by Publishers Weekly
  
  SHORTLISTED for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize

• In her first book of new work since Red Juice: Poems 1998–2008, Nguyen further develops her impactful, complex, and lyrical style. Nguyen’s poems blend startling imagery with a calming sense of stasis. Her work has been described as a feminist ecopoetics, the basis of which can be seen in moments of subtle fascination with the natural world.
  Publishers Weekly

  Nguyen’s playful criticism of our society of the spectacle shows how we deflate the currency of ancient nobility by our own reductive values surrounding identity and beauty, as she cries the old songs down the river.
  The New York Times

  Hoa Nguyen’s poems tread delicately but firmly between the linear demands of narrative and syntax on the one hand and between registers of speech and forms of address on the other. There are spaces for breath, and asides hovering in parentheses. There are also the slippages in language, in the slide from, say "staring" through "starving" and "starring" to "scarring". Everything is at once tangential yet surprisingly direct. This is where the pleasure and depth reside: in the off balancing of the language and its pure, uncalculated tone. What are the poems about? Many things, often simple and direct, like food, or sex, or rivers, or sickness. The poems are packed with fine precisions and particulars. But there is politics too, sometimes startlingly straight as in the poem about Andrew Jackson or sharp-edged as in "Screaming". Violet Energy Ingots is a fully mature work in that it is confident of both its voice and its readers’ alertness. It makes its own space. It demands it and holds it.
  Judges' Citation from the Griffin Poetry Prize

  We quickly fall into a deep trust that whatever she says is earnest to the utmost, is a matter of personal importance....We feel freer to suspend our need for immediate understanding; we feel encouraged to accept uncertainty as a necessary aspect of both the self and poetry. Though at first glance her work may look too challenging to enjoy, these familiarizing and reassuring effects make Nguyen one of the best experimental poets a novice reader can pick up.
  Boston Review

  The poems themselves are violet energy ingots, a series of tenuous knowing moments that eschew the monumental gestures of narrative, polemic, or other familiar forms our cultures have made to mark modernity’s abuses of power. Monumental gestures that give us something to say when asked for an account. Instead, the poems take up the work of showing the way that the very fabric of the daily, of language, and of our selves are marked by historical trauma.
  Karla Kelsey, Constant Critic

  If ever there were a collection of poetry to read between sweeping the floors and scrubbing the dishes, the body moving through a place where thoughts of pharaohs float with thoughts of tomatoes and terry-cloth bathrobes, it would be this one.
  Terry Abrahams, wildness

  …Violet Energy Ingots, shows the poet at the top of her form. Like her previous work, these poems are collages with scenes from domestic life, allusions to the literary canon, surreal imagery, found quotes, and the occasional pop song lyric.
  Eric Nguyen, diaCRITICS

  [S]he somehow manages to point out the serious imperfections in our modern world, in our human history, in people and societies as a whole, while still being in utter awe of the beautiful, the humbling, the miraculous…. Nguyen’s writing is vivid and kaleidoscopic, and you’re just as apt to get lost in her imagery as you are to be moved by her messages.
  Bustle

  Despite all of the otherworldliness of her verse and its digressions, Nguyen keeps us tethered to the present, to the diurnal, and, most impressively, to her.
  Caitlin Youngquist, BOMB Magazine

  Nguyen’s poems are lived in, lived through, woven into the everyday. This dailyness is sometimes domestic, but never solely—it’s political, spiritual, and these are intimately connected… Nguyen’s open form breaks borders between poems, leaving them open in conversation with each other, the reader, the world outside the poem.
  Canthius

  The title and what it signifies hinge upon an industrial-sounding term: an “ingot” is a mass of metal that is cast into a convenient shape for storage (like a brick, for example); in this book, Nguyen compacts life’s days into concise blocks of terse light and power—and they are anything but simple.
  Jennifer MacBain-Stephens, Agape Editions

  Anti-abject, antsy-urgent, these poems rely upon the well-observed phenomenon that vocabulary is itself ticklish, inter-associative and never really all that vague. Nguyen’s highly alliterative, almost leonine line, often proceeding in paired thoughts separated by a breath, is companionable, and commends these poems to a walk.
  Cam Scott, League of Canadian Poets

  Violet Energy Ingots continues her work in the small, personal moment, presenting a series of narratives stiched together in coherent lyric collages of halting breaths, pauses and precise descriptions.
  Rob McLennan

  Violet Energy Ingots is a lesson in the poetics of disturbance… Nguyen’s poetics are such tenuous knowing moments: disparate genres and materials are drawn together and distilled in each poem — distilled but also activated and bright, ingot-like.
  Full Stop

• 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 (Wave Books, 2012); Red Juice (Wave Books, 2014); and Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books, 2016), which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. 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. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Nguyen has lived in Tkaronto since 2011.