Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Nguyen follows up his debut, This Way to the Sugar (2014), with a collection that astounds in its intensity. Through elastic, creative form, Nguyen, a child of Vietnamese immigrants, explores Asian American identity and queer identity with acerbic wit and an open heart. In poems that are, by turns, biting and poignant, the speaker circles complicated relationships with his mother (My mother will die before me. / My mother, who, by then, will love me / will die); his lovers (Let me be clear: any love I find will be treason); and a childhood sexual violation, the trauma of which still lingers (Some spells take years / to cast. Some men / don't know / they're hungry / until they eat). These are the things that keep him on the outskirts of the world; his poetry pushes against the white space, and then pulls back. Before I became alive, I watched the world / without knowing what to look for, the poet says in an early poem; in a final one, I feel furthest from wanting to live when I think of joy as some kind of destination. Despite this, there is blazing life in every ferocious line. Hard to read and harder to put down, this collection will leave the reader feeling much the way the speaker seems to: bitter and hurt and longing to be seen.--Reagan, Maggie Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
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. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
