Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen is a poetry collection charting the links between family, sexuality, and the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States. Nguyen carefully balances the line between raw and tender, tracing a wound readers cannot help but succumb to. But he also utilizes his poetic precision to stitch the gash.
The title evokes several images. For one, and most obvious, the reader can imagine the author as absent from a specific location. It begs the question as to whether he has been evicted or exiled from some place. Another possibility would be an individual telling another, not here, suggesting that whatever activity they are involved in, it can only exist in a specific, other realm.
This second interpretation ties directly into the sharp, sensitive lines that Nguyen traces around his queerness. “White Boy Time Machine” is the uniting theme of the collection, with several poems throughout the book beginning with this phrase. The narrator’s lover, evident in lines such as “Somewhere between Saigon & Sacramento / she would sing my favorite song / if I just waved / my lover’s white skin / like a flag in surrender,” is a white American male. This introduces the conflict of interracial queer relationships.
The first poem of the collection, “White Boy Time Machine Instruction Manual,” says, “Oh, but why am I here? / It seems important to mention all the things / that went wrong.” Here he presents the eternal question of time and place — when can two boys in love exist without judgment? When can two boys, one white and one Vietnamese, exist in a realm constantly torn between ostracization and assimilation? In “White Boy Time Machine: Software,” Nguyen writes, “b u t w h e r e a r e y o u r e a l l y f r o m ? / yesterday is the wrong answer, tomorrow too.” The answer to the question: seemingly nowhere.
His mother resolves the matter of her son’s queerness with what she believes to be a white savior: his lover. In “Nguyễn,” he writes, “For years I craved the red / shock of her anger. / What do you do with tenderness / when all you expect is fury? / He looks like he will keep you safe. / From what? From who?” The narrator, shocked by her acceptance of his queer love, understands that the reconciliation exists only if his lover comes in the form of a hero. In that same poem, only a few stanzas after the mother’s declaration, he writes, “Let me be clear: any love I find will be treason,” knowing that conditional acceptance merely warps the ugly truth into a sharper lie.
This is not the only grief that Nguyen carries. Throughout the collection, he alludes to being assaulted by a female teacher when he was nine years old and mentions his father sparingly enough that his absence tells more of the story than his appearance. His own inability to come to terms with his identity is clear in lines such as “how lonely / it must be / to come from desire / but end / where light ends” from “Ode to the Pubic Hair Stuck In My Throat,” speaking ostensibly about the pubic hair but also of himself.
The white boy time machine does not stop, just as the days march forward without reprieve. However difficult it is to remain in the temporal space described as “not here,” there is no other choice. In “Notes On Staying,” Nguyen writes, “some big god in my big head tells me, my son, you are not needed & the voice is soft & cruel & all my big loves are laughing & happy & today my body does not fit between this joy.”
A stanza later, he says, “I feel furthest from wanting to live when I think of joy as some kind of destination,” meaning that joy is not here, but still, as the title begs, he must stay. At the end of the poem, he presses pause on a story in which he throws himself off the ledge, caught in transit by “whatever it is that propels us through the door of tomorrow & since there was no key, I guess I’ll swallow the door,” meaning that since the future is already pressing upon us, despite our heavy past and sick love, we can do nothing but embrace it.
Not Here was published in 2018, but Nguyen’s new poetry collection, Staying Still, will be published on September 1st, 2026. His Instagram also teases a debut novel, both through Tin House Press. Poetry remains a tool we use to empower, mourn, and overcome, and Not Here, timeless and enduring, props up breathtaking expectations for his new work.
Visual Credit: Christopher Kim
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