Join us in welcoming Hoa Nguyen in discussing A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure with guest, DC-area poet Elizabeth Black!
About Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here:
Sara Cahill Marron’s Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here is a portrait of a world tottering, laid low by COVID-19 in particular, but also by our political fragmentation. Echoes of Yeats, Whitman, and Tennyson, but also experimental language are threaded throughout: "As if the heat is a thing/ you can hide from." Mother Earth personified speaks to us in CSS, HTML, and luxuriant elegiac language, urging shared humanity after the accusation: “My Mountains Could Care Less About You.” From its vividly drawn, lyrically rich title poem to its digitally coded dialogues this book rails against the futility of urban living, wails against societal inequalities and clutches its loved ones close amidst viral fears. Susana H. Case, author of Dead Shark on the N Train (Broadstone Books) writes: this “cutely romantic but somewhat bewildered Apple product [...] carefully warns us, ‘some will die,’ and ‘Kiss10100love’ the screen says, despite the headlines.
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Born in the Mekong Delta, Hoa Nguyen was raised and educated in the United States and has lived in Canada since 2011. Recognized with a 2019 Neustadt International Prize for Literature nomination and Pushcart Prize, Hoa has had the privilege to work and teach all over the United States and Canada, and share her unique perspective through her poetry. She is the author of several books including As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008, and Violet Energy Ingots which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. Her fifth book of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, was released in April 2021 and has garnered support from Publishers Weekly, The Poetry Foundation, Ms Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her writing has been promoted by such outlets as Granta, PEN American Center, CBC Books, Boston Review, The Best Canadian Poetry series, Poetry, The Walrus, and Pleiades.
Elizabeth Black is a resident of Arlington, Virginia. She recently retired from 40 years of nursing to work on poetry and art full time. Her passion for art, art history, different cultures, gardening and the natural world have led her travel the world. Although a latecomer to writing poetry, Elizabeth acknowledges her life-long love of poetry. Her poetry has been published in Blythe Spirit, Bottle Rockets, Frogpond, Heron’s Nest, Modern Haiku, The Northern Virginia Review, and Verse Virtual.
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure is available at Lost City Books!