Please enjoy this overview of Hieu Minh Nguyen's work. Here you will find biographical information, links to poems and interviews, and writing prompts for you to explore.
BIO
Hieu Minh Nguyen is a queer, Vietnamese-American poet raised in St. Paul and currently living in Minneapolis, MN. He is the author of two collections of poetry: This Way to the Sugar (2014) and Not Here (2018). Nguyen was the recipient of the 2017 NEA Fellowship for poetry, the 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and the Kundiman Fellowship. His work tells the story of a queer child raised in the projects of a Midwestern city by a single immigrant mother.
POEMS & PROMPTS
Standing in front of a mirror, my mother tells me she is ugly
says the medication is making her fat. I laugh & walk her
back to the bed. My mother tells me she is ugly in the same voice
she used to say no woman could love you & I watch her
pull at her body & it is mine. My heavy breast.
My disappointing shape. She asks for a bowl of plain broth
& it becomes the cup of vinegar she would pour down my throat.
Everyday after school, I would kneel before her.
Prompt: Most of us have an insecurity that we developed early on in life. Write about an insecurity of yours, observe how it has lived and grown in your body. What is the history of your insecurity? Where was it born?
White Boy Time Machine: Software
why did you bring me here? / i ask / the machine / has a machine
family / who assumes i’ve rigged their boy / to do what i want / by
feeding him / a coin / fashioned with a string / a yo-yo organ / is what
the doctors called it / when my grandmother’s heart fell out of place
/ & did not / return to its country whole / but who ever does / after
leaving / the dinner where his parents tick-ticked boring question at
me / b u t w h e r e a r e y o u r e a l l y f r o m? / yesterday is the
wrong answer, tomorrow too / despite memory, i believe / in hunger /
as a way to pass the time / i count the hornets that escape their
mouths / for years i laid there & pressed / an ear against the
humming /
Prompt: Write a poem in which each line of that poem tells a story of its own.
All my life I watched my mother contemplate an exit, hovering between a
conversation & a doorway. Her sleep, medicated & rich. I imagine, in her
dreams she is tall with laughter. I feel most like her son when I am lonely – a
child again, dragged by her to a party I enjoyed, but then stopped enjoying. In
our future, there are two cabs idling on the driveway, which is a cowardly way
of saying, I cannot kill myself until my mother dies. If joy is what tethers us to
this life then most days, my mother & I float above the pavement, tied
together by the fraying threads of her nightgown. All my life I’ve bitten at the
knots of my solitude. No one wants to be alive when they’re forgotten. When
she is gone, who will call my name?
Prompt: We all have something that tethers us to reality, whether a person, an animal, an object, or a memory. What or who tethers you to your reality?
Of all the things I've tried to do
I was probably worst at selling weed—
robbed weekly, used too much
of my own product, cut each bag
with a dash of oregano –
but then I have to consider that summer
Matty asked me to help him boost cars,
his dad called me a liability –
too paranoid to be lookout,
too shaky to use the slim jim,
didn’t even know how to drive stick –
Prompt: Write a poem about all the versions of yourself you have been.
INTERVIEWS