Violet Energy Ingots

Violet Energy Ingots

<div><p>"What our lives permit us to perceive as givens, Nguyen reveals as mere conditions, inextricably tied to and guided by greater forces—from the economy to the environment, from the Mayan predictions to the menstrual cycle, from the weight of history to the burden of the future." —Michael Brodeur, <I>The Boston Globe</I></p><p>The poems in <I>Violet Energy Ingots</I> 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.</p><p><B>A Brief History of War</B></p><p><I>And what if Jupiter</I><BR><I>is your faith</I><BR></p><p><I>a balloon</I><BR><I>but I call you</I><BR></p><p><I>by the improper</I><BR><I>names I'm stained</I><BR></p><p><I>by the world here</I><BR><I>To be brave and endure</I><BR></p><p><I>the losing    To be brave</I><BR><I>and be the losing</I><BR></p><p><I>Luck    Brutal</I></p><p>Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, DC area, <B>Hoa Nguyen</B> studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded <I>Skanky Possum</I>, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, TX, their home for fourteen years. She is the author of several poetry collections, most recently <I>Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008</I> and <I>As Long as Trees Last</I>. She lives in Toronto, Ontario where she curates a reading series and teaches poetics privately and at Ryerson University.</p><BR></div>