A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

What does it mean to write, with protective and generous omniscience, your mother’s life story? Such is the brilliant, adventurous, and singular task of Hoa Nguyen’s A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, about the poet’s mother, Diệp Anh Nguyễn, who was a stunt motorcyclist in the all-women Vietnamese circus troupe called Hùng Việt. This is a book of anti-gravitational forces where the reader experiences the slamming of celestial and earthly realms into one another: moons crashing into earth, colonizer maps turned upside down, rivers parting like lovers, sonnets tied to the sky, and stars spilling womb-song.

The book’s central image is that of the flying motorist mother, soaring skyward yet always tilting into a circular orbit above the speaker through the many dimensions of this spasming, tireless archive. The verse biography is weaved with meditations of pre- and post- “Fall of Saigon,” and in poems such as “Made by Dow,” “Notes on Operation Hades,” and “Napalm Notes,” Nguyen details the devastating effects of chemical warfare used by the United States during the Vietnam War. Nerve toxins and herbicides enrapture the natural imagery of the poems, associated throughout with poison, subterranean worlds, or two-faced behavior: “heartlessness of flowers,” “feed / on toxic flowers,” “gathering floating flowers / underworld yourself,” “flower hypocrisy,” “frenzy of magenta flowers.”

At times, I am puzzled by the speaker’s direct indirectness (“Born Phantoms / we have become phantoms”) and yet, this might be the poet’s way of eliding generational time. I am drawn to what Nguyen leaves inscrutable, untranslatable, resisting taxonomy and narrative itself; the way she refuses cartographies laid out by men, by nation-states, by form, by colonizer, and even by the fatalistic dynamics between mother and child. The poet is furiously loving about her mother’s boldness (“The running blue shock of her”), warping formulaic social expectations of womanhood and motherhood, and allowing her own mother to exist, untethered.