This collection of persona poems tells the story of the infamous Lewis & Clark expedition from the point of view of Clark's personal slave, York. The poems form a narrative of York's inner and outer journey, before, during and after the expedition--a journey from slavery

    Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail, and sometimes they end up in a slapstick sex scene that climaxes with a broken table. The book embraces characters who are flawed, emotional, and who care too much about things that are ridiculous.

    Ryo Yamaguchi describes Nguyen’s writing as “a kind of stuttering with intelligences, impressions, and emotions flaring up as the words find their pathways.” As grounded in the earth as in the stars, her poems are reminders of the possibilities of contemplation in every space and moment.A Brief History of WarAnd what if Jupiteris your faitha balloonbut I call youby the impropernames I'm stainedby the world hereTo be brave and endurethe losing    To be braveand be the losingLuck    BrutalBorn in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, DC area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, TX, their home for fourteen years. She is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and As Long as Trees Last. She lives in Toronto, Ontario where she curates a reading series and teaches poetics privately and at Ryerson University.