The urgent poems in Nguyen's new book impart a sense of how one might look at the various parts of a life and let them speak out without settling into simple dichotomies. These poems powerfully enact the timeless pulls of motherhood and the physicality of mothering, as well as how one can care about and question the political and physical world outside the home. Hecate Lochia is a book of blurred divisions and of connections: moods influence poems, language influences events, the planets influence behavior, people's lives influence the natural world. Cathy Wagner says about the work, "Space scores Hoa's poems and inserts them into time. Her spaces resemble connecting canyons, arroyos, that threaten to rush full in a storm—they are capacious enough to handle the emotion (mine) that rises to meet the poem."

This book review originally appeared in American Poets.