A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

"In this poetry collection, Hoa Nguyen writes about her relationship with her mother, who used to be a proud stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troupe. Nguyen’s poems are intimate ones, in which form and language crash into each other. Fragments of sentences spread across the page, and nothing is directly explained, as the poet is more focused on interacting with ghosts – of displacement, of poverty, of the Vietnam War – than translating her Vietnamese heritage to readers. And where language is not enough, we get actual images: The book comes with a postcard with a picture of the poet’s mother on a motorcycle driving down a dirt road. More such images don the last pages of this National Book Award finalist, accompanying what can only be described as a very moving biography written in verse."