Tells of the Crackling

Hoa Nguyen

POETRY  |  $12 $9

July 2015
OUT OF PRINT
Read an excerpt

AFTER THE MURDER BALLAD

Bringing some other fine things
hard full life     atoms springing

No money     No fine things

Flatteringly     we are the cave
It will be OK in disgrace

She jumped     Came to the river
deep water     Thou restless ungathered

orphan     Tell me your mind
to mend    to drown you in despair

Let me sing gone
If I can live kicked & choked

Turned around in deep water

powerful, vivid, and even visceral

Dan Shewan

Tells of the Crackling reveals love in its lost and often fragmentary forms. It sifts through rivers and blue explosions with a “yell of living.” How can we attempt to retrieve the irretrievable through language?

About the Author

Hoa Nguyen is the author of the chapbook Tells of the Crackling (UDP) and several books, including As Long As Trees Last (Wave), Red Juice (Wave), and Violet Energy Ingots (Wave), which was nominated for a 2017 Griffin Prize for poetry. Based in Toronto, she teaches poetics at several universities and in a popular, long-running private workshop.

Praise

Hoa Nguyen's poems probe dailiness to divorce us from our base assumptions about how language might present the world to us. 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.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson

[Hoa Nguyen's poems] 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.

Academy of American Poets

Nguyen remains one of the most powerful, vivid, and even visceral contemporary poets working today.

Dan Shewan

The thirty-some pages of short lyrics in Tells of the Crackling continue Nguyen’s work in the small, personal moment, presenting a series of narratives presented in halting breaths, pauses and precise descriptions. Her cadences are marvelous, and constructed entirely for the sake of attention.

Rob McLennan

Publication Details

Chapbook
Hand-bound. 4.5 x 8 in
Publication Date: July 01 2015
Distribution: Direct Only