Coming
Staying Still by Hieu Minh Nguyen
Stegner and NEA Fellow Hieu Minh Nguyen’s visionary poetry collection about generational loneliness, desire, and longing
- Sale Date
- ISBN
- 9781638934707
- Page Count
- 112
- Language
- English
- Imprint
- Tin House
Meet the Author
Hieu Minh Nguyen
Stegner and NEA Fellow Hieu Minh Nguyen’s visionary poetry collection about generational loneliness, desire, and longing
The highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning poetry collection Not Here, Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Staying Still centers on the question of how: How do our anxieties around the idea of belonging estrange us from the very world we seek to belong in? How impossible does it feel to stay still and face ourselves? From the intimate longing of queer boyhood to the collective expectations imposed upon children of refugees, these poems face head-on the rejections, grief, and violence we fear in fractured family dynamics, love, and desire as we search for our place in this world.
The highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning poetry collection Not Here, Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Staying Still centers on the question of how: How do our anxieties around the idea of belonging estrange us from the very world we seek to belong in? How impossible does it feel to stay still and face ourselves? From the intimate longing of queer boyhood to the collective expectations imposed upon children of refugees, these poems face head-on the rejections, grief, and violence we fear in fractured family dynamics, love, and desire as we search for our place in this world.
Praise for Staying Still
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“This Way to the Sugar, Not Here, Hieu Minh Nguyen is always leading us somewhere. Now, with the transcendent Staying Still, Nguyen is done being on the move and seems instead to be saying, “Come closer.” Though place and travel are still very much part of this master poet’s obsessions, here the soul is the location, and Nguyen, the poet laureate of movements both spiritual and physical, invites us into the depths of his own to show us—via exquisite poems that oscillate with a dancer’s grace between brutally honest confession and deeply witty humor—the depths and heights of loneliness, love, desire, kinship, and all the things that for this writer make up the living of life. With the sharp attention of a poet and the charisma of a drag queen, Nguyen returns with his best collection yet. Get in. Have a seat in the back. I am in the passenger seat heading wherever this poet wants to take me.”
Danez Smith -
“Disarmingly plainspoken, haunted, and lyrical, these poems make a clear and devastating cartography of distance, of longing, of love. I love this book, these poems. I would follow them anywhere.”
Safia Elhillo -
“Every time I read a poem by Hieu Minh Nguyen, I am left breathless and baffled by his sheer talent and capacity for storytelling. The poems in this collection are extraordinary—precise, curious, gutting, subtle, and witty. It is nothing short of a gift to be ruined again and again by the work of a once-in-a-lifetime writer.”
Olivia Gatwood
About the Imprint
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