Ripped

Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Writers' League of Texas Discovery Award, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks American L?c Bat for My Mother and Hidden Labor & The Naked Body. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is a humor editor for The Offing Mag and co-organizes Growing From Our Roots: An Asian Debut Author Showcase. He received his MFA and PhD from the University of Mississippi and currently teaches at Boston College and Tufts University.

Sonnet for the Hands Around My Throat Foreword [ ] Manuscript Epistolary Haibun Aubade on the Again-Again of My Morning Clean Sonnet How to Write the Final Note to Your Lover Self-Portrait as Frozen Blueberry Haibun for the Asian Body Doing Infinite Push-Ups in a Mississippi Field Spine Decompression Double Sonnet The Last Poet on Earth Not in Therapy Shoulder Day Motivational Speech by Sisyphus Sonnet for the Praying Mantis On Your Last Set of Weighted Lunges, You See Your Reflection on the Mississippi Field Beyond the Window True Failure Sonnet "You Sank My Destroyer!": How Harold & Kumar Goes to White Castle Influences the Writer's Relationship to Assimilation, the Body, and Whiteness Post-Apocalypse Possum The Last Poet on Earth Not into Astrology Haibun by the Loon How to Write an SOS for Your Loneliness to Place on Your Porch Nocbade Rest Day: Coffee / Coffee / Love / Love Chest Day Cicada as Personal Trainer I Wish, How I Wish Ghazal How to Write a Letter to Your Resident from the Perspective of the House Read This Poem Only Once Carpenter Sestina for Each Set in the Gym Ars Poetica Haibun Leg Day on Sunday Spine Compression Mirrored Sonnet Beefcake Gravitas You Live in the Aftermath One More Sonnet to My 14-Year-Old Self "What would our mothers write about us . . . " Abandoned Duplex Instructions for Burning Your Kitchen The Loneliest I've Ever Felt Is Right Now [Aubade at 11:10 AM] Sonnet Beginning with Mark Wahlberg Ending in Spite Locker Room Ghazal Rest Day: Birding Someday, I'll Loathe Joshua Nguyen American L?c Bat for the End of the World, [at Long Last, at Least We Have Our Language?] or the Final Sonnet Artifact to Be Found Beneath All the Rubble [ ] Notes & Acknowledgments

"Ripped gifts us with Mad Libs, ghazals, and other repetitions, remaking the loneliness of an Asian American male body into a new set of poetic possibilities." --Cathy Linh Che "A force to be reckoned with. With its propulsive and formally muscular poems, Ripped is an argument that the tendon connecting muscle to bone echoes the ligature between the poet's imagination and everything that breathes." --sam sax