Hoa Nguyen’s Violet Energy Ingots is such an amazing book.
She is her but I don’t re- member remember the ashes I obsess She said
What is it to skew the word “remember” across enjambment into “re-/member”? It’s almost as though Nguyen breaks the word open to make an opposite of “dis-member,” as though to obsess over ashes were a mythical form of re-making, and as though the small lyric act of breaking words open to put them back together were this obsession’s magic. But I’m also thinking about how Nguyen obsesses over the ashes of words again and again throughout this book, how words shift along sleights of sound into new words (“I wor—I woke up,” “Eyes for hearts / I mean hearts for eyes,” “I am staring not starving/ maybe starring not scarring”). I wonder whether the “re-/member” asks us to think about membership, communities of sound, in which inclusivity is performed on a sonic level, where phonemes & fragments of words are collected as “members.” In this way, “re-/member” performs utopic everyday togetherness on a sonic level, which then becomes manifest throughout the book imagistically & thematically, in lists, in dreams, and in the “tenuous knowing moment” of the book’s title, Violet Energy Ingots.
