Violet Energy Ingots
— Terry Abrahams
A clean, minimalist exterior envelopes a series of short poems that I like to call ‘grocery store poetry’ in Hoa Nguyen’s latest collection. That sounds diminishing, but let me explain—to scribble a fragment of an idea down on scrap paper or on one’s phone while waiting in line at a grocery store, coffee shop, etc. comes naturally (yet still so often unexpectedly) to poets living in urban areas. The most enduring phrases and insightful moments can come from instances like these—caught between one place and the next, a pocket of time that exists then and only then. Nguyen’s poems reflect this in their fragmented style. While most deal with much of what one might call the domestic, many of them recall notes taken while studying or highlighted passages from textbooks. The poems ‘Pharaoh Notes’ and ‘Machiavelli Notes’ are poetic in form but factual in nature. Many more deal with historical figures, drawing in the political aspects of life, such as the poem ‘Who was Andrew Jackson?’ Nguyen answers exactly that for us through a series of facts in a poem that reads like a poem while feeling like a punch to the gut.
Characters out of myth make their way onto the page, too. There are mentions of Diana, Orpheus, Mimir, Eve—all familiar faces in poetry, but here, in Nguyen’s hands, they are pressed between poems featuring spring in Toronto, cutting onions, and dreams of old friends. The distance between such stories and daily life is null. It suddenly makes perfect sense to place Mimir’s head and a cutting board spread with onion slices side by side.
Violet Energy Ingots doesn’t have a theme—it just is. Her work is allowed to be without giving shape to any particular kind of being. This form of writing is incredibly soothing. It allows the work—and the reader—space to breathe. There is no urgency in Nguyen’s writing, especially in those moments where one can almost see her thought processes—noted corrections and misnamings prick certain poems with a hint of humour. But particularly lovely are her poems that deal with big feelings in small ways, ones that, of course, involve the presence of beloved others. In ‘PS,’ Nguyen takes a sentiment and style often attributed William Carlos Williams’ poems and makes it her own:
If you get this
before you leave
take some California irises
home with you
Put in fridge until spring
Plant in circle
Such simplicity throughout this collection only heightens the feeling of being in the moment. It makes connecting to these poems as easy as glancing at a grocery list, but with all of the emotion and none of the exactness. Well, perhaps some exactness—the poem ‘I Am Too’ captures a feeling I previously thought near impossible to put into words:
I am too much
I am forever
too much and every day
you never come
to my house
If ever there were a collection of poetry to read between sweeping the floors and scrubbing the dishes, the body moving through a place where thoughts of pharaohs float with thoughts of tomatoes and terry-cloth bathrobes, it would be this one.