Not Here

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.

Publication date: April 10, 2018

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 120 pages

ISBN: 9781566895095

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. 

Winner of the 2019 Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry

Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry

Finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry

“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

“[V]ery few could do what Nguyen has done.”

—The 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

“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

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

—Poetry Foundation

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

—Entertainment Weekly

“Nguyen’s imagery is a sensory wonder, evocative of the depths of trauma and the dizzying heights of hopefulness and desire.” 

—Nylon

“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. This is an essential debut."

—Alexander Chee

“Not Here blazes and enlightens.” 

—Terrance Hayes

“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

“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.” 

—Ocean Vuong