The Selection Committee Radio Show with Hoa Nguyen, 6/12/22

“Music and poetry share a single origin.“
Hoa Nguyen joins host Nate Heiges to talk about her acclaimed 2021 poetry collection “A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure,” which takes her mother’s early career as a barefoot daredevil in an all-women stunt motorcycle troupe in Vietnam as a starting point for meditations on language, music, and sensation mapped onto global politics and war. Nguyen points to the kindhip between the traditional music of the Mekong delta and the US Mississippi delta blues, to star-crossed lovers and ghosts, to the voice of the poet and the voice of the single-stringed Đàn bầu. Hoa generously shares poems from this latest collection and shares stories about her extraordinary mother. We also learn that the secret source of power for foundational hardcore band Minor Threat was Ian MacKaye’s Mom—yet another surprisingly common maternal badass.