Staying Still

Stegner and NEA Fellow Hieu Minh Nguyen’s visionary poetry collection about generational loneliness, desire, and longing.

"I am in the passenger seat heading wherever this poet wants to take me.” —Danez Smith

The highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning poetry collection Not Here, Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Staying Still centers on the question of how: How do our anxieties around the idea of belonging estrange us from the very world we seek to belong in? How impossible does it feel to stay still and face ourselves? From the intimate longing of queer boyhood to the collective expectations imposed upon children of refugees, these poems face head-on the rejections, grief, and violence we fear in fractured family dynamics, love, and desire as we search for our place in this world.