Poetry by Hieu Minh Nguyen

April 10, 2018 • 6 x 9 • 120 pages • 978-1-56689-509-5

Being queer and Asian American; families we are born into and ones we chose; nostalgia, trauma and history—all dissected fearlessly.

Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen’s poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.

About the Author

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018). Winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, both of his collections of poetry were also finalists for a Minnesota Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. In 2019 Hieu was awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. He is also 2018 Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, 2018 McKnight Writing Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, the recipient of the Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant, and an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. He is a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. His work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, the New York Times, Best American Poetry, the Academy of American Poets, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. He lives in Oakland and is a graduate from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. 

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please call (612) 338-0125 or email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Reviews

Winner of the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry
Finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry
Entropy, “Best of 2018: Best Poetry Books & Poetry Collections”
2019 Over the Rainbow Booklist Poetry title

“I’m always struck by Hieu’s balance of tenderness in his poems, the way that he holds a thin knife to both humor and trauma, turning one so easily into another.” —NBC News

“Nguyen attempts a courageous exorcism of shame in his brilliant and disquieting second collection, exposing the baggage of living as a queer person of color in a white-supremacist, classist, heteronormative society. . . . Nguyen communicates with stunning clarity the ambivalence of shame, how it can commandeer one’s life and become almost a comfort.” —Publisher’s Weekly, boxed and starred review

“[V]ery few could do what Nguyen has done.” —New York Times

“Nguyen’s voice feels simultaneously young and ageless, uncertain and wise. His poems are pitched somewhere between page and stage, as if said aloud right into your ear.” —NPR

“Nguyen, a queer Vietnamese-American, confronts whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia in poems that ache with loneliness, desire, and the giddy terrors of hoping for love.” —Publishers Weekly

“The worlds Nguyen summons and dismisses in these poems are mesmerizing, like the visions of a sorcerer, but not because they’re magical—because they’re real. All of them animated by a wild wit that feels like it could throw a car like a baseball. I’ve been waiting for this book, and if you’ve ever read one of these, you probably have been too—this is an essential debut. Not Here is here.” —Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night

“Not Here will transport you through the entire spectrum of human emotion—these poems will move you, reflect your loneliness, imbue you with hope, and fill you with nostalgia and joy.” —BuzzFeed

“Nguyen is a writer whose talent, charisma, and intelligent work have him primed to become one of the most celebrated poets of our generation. . . . His work is painfully beautiful, at once fraught and hopeful, and always pulling at the axes of desire.” —Literary Hub

“Clear-eyed observations on the bond between mother and son, trauma, and race.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Hieu Minh Nguyen’s work is defiant in its tenderness.” —Poetry Foundation

“These dazzling poems by Vietnamese-American poet Hieu Minh Nguyen are exactly what we want to be reading next year, as they provocatively address the in-between spaces in life, those areas between love and longing, pain and pleasure, belonging and alienation. Nguyen’s imagery is a sensory wonder, evocative of the depths of trauma and the dizzying heights of hopefulness and desire.” —Nylon

“[Nguyen] illuminates how one can find a home inside self-hate, and communicates with stunning clarity the ambivalence of shame—how it can commandeer one’s life and become almost a comfort.” —Publishers Weekly

“This is a generous poetry, a poetry that never forgets that the reader is an active participant and essential component to its magic.” —The Corresponder

“‘Sometimes, to avoid a catastrophe: the disappearance of a limb or relative, you must make sure everything burns,’ we are told in Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Not Here. These brilliant poems illuminate those spaces between sincerity and mischief, vulnerability and audacity. Nguyen’s irrepressible warmth is fueled by honesty, longing, and curiosity. ‘Everything burns’ in this amazing collection. Not Here blazes and enlightens.” —Terrance Hayes

“Any reader who encounters Hieu Minh Nguyen’s second collection, Not Here, will likely be struck by the intense sense of longing and hunger that pulses at the center of his poems—the search for human companionship and raw, physical encounters as a means to self-love and social acceptance . . .” —American Poets Magazine

“Outstanding collection of poetry about queerness, boyhood, sons and their mothers, what we carry when who we are is not enough for the people who should love us best, desire and the thrall of want . . . all the poems offer something beautiful, razor sharp, intelligent, interesting, memorable.” —Roxane Gay, Goodreads review

“Nguyen’s lines are raw in their emotionality and will cut through you like a knife—this book will move you, inspire you, instill nostalgia in you, and break your heart (in the best way possible), all at once.” —BuzzFeed Books

“Hieu Minh Nguyen is a poet who constantly breaks and reshapes the heart to make it beat stronger and wiser. He deftly carves into the complicated spaces between mother and son, lover and speaker, vulnerability and desire, provocation and kindness where these poems breathe.” —Hyphen

“Nguyen’s most striking gift . . . is finding moments of almost unbearable emotional pressure inside of the stories he is telling.” —Muzzle Magazine

“Nguyen has become a luthier, mastering the art of hollowness, fashioning poetic instruments that skillfully carve emotional space in his readers, where empathy and the strikingly beautiful music of his poetry can resound.” —DiaCRITICS

“Hieu Minh Nguyen’s fabulous book of poems, Not Here, is just one of those books you can’t stop reading. There are so many complicated relationships traversed in this book, of which the speaker’s relationship with his mother is the primary one. Nguyen is a magician with form, using a variety of forms as a way of searching and longing but never finding. As the speaker says: ‘Let me be clear: any love I find will be treason.’ This is a book about desire, about race, about sexual identity, about the slippage of memory, about culture. The writing is fierce and sad, and so skilled. It crackles. It is essential.” —Victoria Chang

“These poems feel by turns like they will shatter apart or stab you to death. Either way, they’re honed to a deadly point and pointed right at you. It’s as beautiful as it is painful.” —Roy Christopher

“Nguyen has created a poetry collection that serves as a map, as an escape plan, as a guide to surviving in a world violently opposed to lives lived outside a whitewashed outline.” —Bustle

“Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Not Here is a book I brace for, in awe and relief. His work is so tight, searing, and unabashedly sharp and full at once. His poems turn me into a horizontal entity. Reading them, I have to lie down. They remind me of gravity, how it pins me to the world without ever touching me. Hieu’s work is like that. A kind of force. Or better yet, a force of kindness.” —Ocean Vuong, Literary Hub

“In his second collection, Not Here, Hieu Minh Nguyen harnesses the political power of the lyric; he uses its intimacy to make public those private moments of harm that happen where race, sexuality and immigration status intersect.” —Star Tribune

“Nguyen reflects with painful honesty on his queer Vietnamese-American identity in this powerful new collection.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Drawing from his own life as a queer Vietnamese American who lives in tension with whiteness, nostalgia, and desire, Not Here is one of the most celebrated collections out this year.” —The Margins

“In [Not Here], the pain is so real and raw that it nearly overflows the superbly crafted lines… absorbing, important reading” —Library Journal

“Nyguyen’s sophomore collection is a study in shame and how easily one can find comfort in such a detrimental feeling.” —Electric Literature

“There is blazing life in every ferocious line.” —Booklist

“Not Here is a remarkable work of emotional generosity and alchemic poetic power, not only delving into trauma, isolation, and pain, but also demonstrating how such experiences may be transformed.” —East Bay Review

“Nguyen’s gorgeously raw lyricism reveals a man in between: navigating gentleness and fury; love and war; his own desires and ‘the lace-white landscape’ of his mother’s; and Saigon and Minneapolis, where ‘my grief / is a foreign currency,’ where ‘white folks this far north either under-spice or over-spice their food like they’re overcompensating for history.’” —O Magazine

“Nguyen’s highly touted collection is a haunting and occasionally heartbreaking dissection of what it means to be a queer person of color in a society—and family—seemingly aligned against you.” —Little Infinite

“Hieu Minh Nguyen blesses the reader with a new metaphor seemingly every turn.” —Alegrarse

“[Nguyen] is a poet who knows how his words should look on the page; how the dissonance between experience and language is physically manifested, so that each line of verse is a reckoning. . . . He’s reached it, the sublime.” —Wildness

“Not Here is a collection of survival, surviving all the weight that gathers and bears down and Nguyen never gives or settles for easy answers. Instead, he acknowledges that life, that being here, is not an uncomplicated thing but a worthy thing, and one that his collection continuously points toward.” —Arkansas International

“Again and again, [Nguyen] slowly drops you then catches you, from one revelatory juxtaposition to the next.” —The Adroit Journal

“Not Here continues unpacking memories of abuse and loss, confronting cultural barriers in sex and love, and staging painful, compromising mother-son dynamics.” —Minnesota Monthly

“The confessional and flippant, innocent and cruel, play equal parts of Nguyen’s unbroken conversation with his forever-seeking self.” —City Pages

“It’s rare that words feel as embodied as they do in Nguyen’s poems: he imagines himself in the bodies of others (his mother’s, a blond boy’s), he takes other bodies into his own. It brings an intimate particularity to the abstractions of his identity—being Vietnamese in America, being queer—and reminds you just how intimate identity is.” —Phinney Books

“In this accomplished collection, Nguyen practices an abundance of poetic approaches and modes. For the reader, the richness of expression is intoxicating.” —BookPage

“An important read and an important reread.” —hyppe

“‘Like all agony, there are pleasant moments / but only when we forget / what carried us here,’ says Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Not Here. His is a brutally beautiful collection of poems that considers home, queerness, Vietnamese American identity, whiteness, trauma. It is imbued with a hungry wit, seeking belonging, seeking existence, seeking survival. The speaker interrogates his own origins: the blanks, the empty spaces, the words whited out. ‘Oh, but why am I here?’ he asks. The memories he encounters are fossilized creatures, unearthed as these poems kneel down in a field and sift the dirt of childhood through their fingers, looking to see what forgiveness they might find.” —Elizabeth Willis, Avid Bookshop

“Hieu Minh Nguyen has such a wonderful spirit, and that spirit pours through each and every page. This collection has it all; the poems will make you drop your surroundings and stand in awe. I love this book so much. It was like a punch straight to the heart, and I mean that in the best way.” —Matt Keliher, Subtext Books

“In Not Here, bodies are imperfect works, subject to doubt, desire, and decay—in equal parts.” —The Millions

“Not Here is filled with ghosts, with longing and loneliness, and a fearless attempt to reconcile the past/present/future with a stubborn will to survive it all. This stunning and heartbreaking book is a testament to the enduring relevancy and importance of poetry. Surrender to Nguyen’s linguistic alchemy and courageous spirit and be transformed.” —Unabridged Bookstore

“Nguyen uses a wide variety of styles to provocatively confront whiteness, evoke both pleasure and pain, and find a sense of home in deep loneliness.” —Washington Blade

Praise for Hieu Minh Nguyen:

Lambda Literary Award finalist
Minnesota Book Award finalist
Poets & Writers Debut Poets 2014

“Hieu Minh Nguyen’s poems travel through time.” —PBS NewsHour 

“Nguyen’s writing is by turns electrifying and somber, heartrending and triumphant. He packs a devastating amount of emotion into just a few words, and each poem bristles with striking images.” —Hyphen 

“Hieu’s book should be required reading. He is patient with his ghosts, letting each sing its song of broken glass and burning houses and bathroom rugs as band aids for black mold. I can’t imagine life without these poems. Thank you Hieu.” —Bao Phi, author of Sông I Sing

“This Way To the Sugar explodes with a longing to hold the past and future, make them dance and give birth to Hieu Minh Nguyen, who the whole time has been spinning each line into impossible being. These are gut-wrenching, thought-provoking, death-defying poems filled with brilliant bursts of gusto that will clear out your ‘house . . . infested with subtitles.’” —Ed Bok Lee, author of Whorled & Real Karaoke People 

“You owe it to yourself to read this book. That may sound exaggerated, but it is my hallowed truth: Hieu Minh Nguyen’s poetry reminds me why I began writing and why I love this genre. His work is crisp and brave and incredibly alive. Each poem will thump inside you like a new heart.” —Sierra DeMulder, author of Today Means Amen