Not Here

Starred review from March 19, 2018
Nguyen (This Way to the Sugar) 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. He illuminates how one can find a home inside self-hate, how "grief can taste of sugar if you run/ your tongue along the right edge." Nguyen's fearful mother symbolizes the wider world, her homophobia and internalized racism evident in her response to a picture of his white boyfriend who "will keep you safe." Nguyen articulates feelings of inadequacy engendered by his mother's judgment in heartrending detail: "she knelt in front of a shrine & asked// to be blessed with a daughter & here I am: the wrong/ monster; truck stop prom queen in his dirt gown." Another specter lurks, of Nguyen's memories of sexual abuse. "Somewhere in this story I am nine years old/ filling the loud hollows with cement to drown out the ghost," Nguyen writes. And a series of poems titled "White Boy Time Machine" contends with xenophobia and imperialism: "I look out the window/ & I don't see a sunset, I see a man's// pink tongue razing the horizon." Nguyen communicates with stunning clarity the ambivalence of shame, how it can commandeer one's life and become almost a comfort.

May 15, 2018

In this second collection from Lambda finalist Nguyen (This Way to the Sugar), the pain is so real and raw that it nearly overflows the superbly crafted lines. This son of Vietnamese immigrants explores the horrors of the war that reshaped his family while limning his struggles with being gay in an unaccepting community. In particular, Nguyen affectingly highlights his difficult relationship with his mother, who "knelt in front of a shrine & asked// to be blessed with a daughter & I here I am: the wrong/ monster; truck stop prom queen in his dirt gown." Yet by book's end he asks, "When she is gone, who will call my name?" Memory is no plus; several "White Boy Time Machine" poems uncomfortably recall early, edgy sex, while elsewhere the poet proclaims: "descendants of flight/ enough already!" VERDICT Not easygoing but absorbing, important reading.

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