Review: Ask About Language As If It Forgets by Hoa Nguyen // Margaryta Golovchenko
Lured by the soft gold of the cover paper, I pull out Hoa Nguyen’s chapbook Ask About Language As If It Forgets from the neat bundle of chapbooks lying on my bookshelf. Months have passed since I heard Nguyen read her poetry and talk about her personal history and upbringing, about the significance and presence of ghosts in her work.
Revisiting the poems now, I feel a hazy recollection tugging from somewhere in the back of my mind, of the legend of a haunted school (or was it a monastery?) and of a woman in Nguyen’s family who performed daring motorcycle stunts in a circus in Vietnam in the 1960s. Though the details are fuzzy, what I remember most clearly is the sensation, the enraptured desire to remain in my role as a listener for as long as possible, for the moment to remain unbroken for as long as possible.
Ask About Language As If It Forgets invokes the same sort of feeling in its reader, whether it is the overlay created with each reread or, perhaps more significantly, the unshakeable feeling of a dual presence and absence that comes across in the very first read-through. The content of the poems is similarly fraught with a sense of unresolved momentum, not because of stasis and inactivity, but due to their continued presence as part of both personal and collective becoming and being.
Nguyen signals these “present absences” in her writing with gaps in the middle of lines, creating spaces of potential and memory, respite and contemplation. This strategy recalls the words of Alice Notley in her 1992 collection The Descent of Alette on her decision to use quotation marks to frame groupings of words: “they’re there, mostly, to measure the poem […] mak[ing] the reader slow down and silently articulate—not slur over mentally—the phrases at the pace, and with the stresses, I intend.” In Ask About Language As If It Forgets, the danger of readers rushing through and jumping over these gaps the way they might in Notley’s collection is largely absent; the writing itself is an endless yet ever-turning torrent that alternates between “Swollen rivers mov[ing] fast in the wet/ season” and “the dry season/ [where] the light is a blue you can hold.”
For those who might attempt such a reckless feat, Nguyen prepares additional poetic speed-bumps whose loaded sparseness makes it difficult not to pause and linger, whether it is the inevitable curiosity that arises at the end of “Why This Haunted Middle and Door Hung With Haunted Girl Bones” that ends on a free frame-like moment cut short—“Clouds/and black in the afternoon (untranslatable)”—or the never-ending end of “Failed Tower Ca Dao,” where the reader quite literally drifts off to the speaker telling us about how they
feed
on toxic flowers kiss one
or any flower row a petal boat
absurd longing to sing the sun
to exist and live an island of.
Myself, I am still hanging over the lines “I kick the wicker dog kick it/ hard to explain the ancient joke,” in part because of the multiple possibilities contained within that one break, and in part because in those lines, Nguyen’s ghosts of language call out to my own, the latter murmuring with joy, sensing a kindred presence.
Margaryta Golovchenko is a settler-immigrant, poet, critic, and academic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory, Canada. The author of two poetry chapbooks, she is completing her MA in art history at York University and can be found sharing her (mis)adventures on Twitter @Margaryta505.
