Not Here

It's rare that words feel as embodied as they do in Nguyen's poems: he imagines himself in the bodies of others (his mother's, a blond boy's), he takes other bodies into his own. It brings an intimate particularity to the abstractions of his identity—being Vietnamese in America, being queer—and reminds you just how intimate identity is. You're a body, and your body doesn't always feel it's entirely yours, especially when you're waiting for a man "who will come, hopefully, in the next hour / to pin me to a map of hunger." This is not an easy book to let go of.