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Winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry
“A force to be reckoned with. With its propulsive and formally muscular poems, Ripped is an argument that the tendon connecting muscle to bone echoes the ligature between the poet’s imagination and everything that breathes.”
—sam sax
“Ripped gifts us with Mad Libs, ghazals, and other repetitions, remaking the loneliness of an Asian American male body into a new set of poetic possibilities.”
—Cathy Linh Che
Picking up where Come Clean left off, Joshua Nguyen’s second collection of poems offers the reader a supercharged vision of a body in motion, seeking the keys to happiness.
From “Shoulder Day Motivational Speech by Sisyphus” to “Sestina for Each Set in the Gym,” and from “Spine Compression Mirrored Sonnet” to “Haibun for the Asian Body Doing Infinite Push-Ups in a Mississippi Field,” the poems in this collection are laser-focused on both the craft of writing and the effort to craft a body. The sensibilities and the cleverness delve deep, revealing inner pain, outer doubts, and the constant motion of a search for belonging.
Experimenting with global traditional forms (ghazal, sestina, aubade, sonnet, haibun) and inventing interactive structures reminiscent of Mad Libs, Nguyen effortlessly breathes life into unexpected places. Ripped is a tour-de-force collection that methodically excises all the loneliness out of a body destined to be both loved and scrutinized..
Ripped
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Winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, selected by Carmen Giménez Smith
Winner of the Writers’ League of Texas Discovery Award
Winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award
“I am so deeply moved by the subdued lyric force of this collection, if only subdued could capture the elegant control Nguyen exerts on his line. Sensuously constructed, in Come Clean he looks at the vast landscape of history through the desire for Marie Kondo’s order and a cure for imposter’s syndrome, in a book that’s as current as it is timeless.”
—Carmen Giménez Smith
Joshua Nguyen’s sharp, songlike, and often experimental collection compartmentalizes past trauma—sexual and generational—through the quotidian. Poems aim to confront the speaker’s past by physically, and mentally, cleaning up. Here, the Asian-American masculine interrogates the domestic space through the sensual and finds healing through family and in everyday rhythms: rinsing rice until the water runs clear, folding clean shirts, and attempts at re-creating an unwritten family recipe. Yet past wounds remain present like permanent marker under layers of paint or spilled fish sauce set into car upholstery. Infused with the Shinto-inspired organizing practices of KonMari and the catchy nihilism of Mitski’s songs, the poems in Come Clean unpack, organize, and tidy up life’s messy joys and hurtful chaos with intimacy, grace, and vulnerability.
Come Clean
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American Lục Bát For My Mother
In American Lục Bát for My Mother, Joshua Nguyen reimagines the lục bát, a traditional Vietnamese form, to bridge past and present, east and west, tradition and innovation. The poems sizzle with garlic and fish sauce as the speaker tries (and fails) to recreate one of his mother’s recipes—but beneath these tender love letters from a son to his mother simmers a crackly interrogation of American imperialism, whiteness, assimilation, and survival. How can we honor and preserve the histories, languages, songs, and recipes that are carried across borders and filtered through generations, while still holding space for expansion and connection, gratitude and honesty, salt and sugar?