Review: 'Staying Still' by Hieu Minh Nguyen

The Morning After · Issue 1

Neil Czeszejko

Jun 25, 2026

A conceptual artifact for Hieu Minh Nguyen’s poetry collection “Staying Still,” published by Tin House. The composition features a retro silver television centerpiece collaged onto a light-blue, waxy-textured paper background; the screen displays a minimalist, faceless illustration of a shirtless man leaning intimately close to a bathroom mirror, his hand gently cradling the jawline of his own reflection. Text elements evoke a dating-app interface, noting the publication date of September 2026 and categorized under match signals for poetry and LGBTQ+ audiences. Includes reviewer credit for Neil Czeszejko and a bio block on the art of interpretation. Part of the Literary Review series at The Subtext Review.

Notes taken the morning after a first date with Staying Still by Hieu Minh Nguyen.

FIRST READ

shy but clearly hiding something / somehow already mid-conversation

hunger meets its reflection, returning the dulled animal to us: the one drawn to the scent of all that is trivial, and therefore toothsome

TABLE TALK

startling / self-composed / alluringly distant

brought into focus through outlawed language (“beautiful”), there’s the urge to align the world’s edges with the body’s flourish
tonally, the moves are so smooth they’re almost startling—so startling they arouse a sense of dazed familiarity
- particularly in Intimacy, which stabs its own concept with lulling strokes
the kind of comedy that can only be called human, though not anything that can be called comedy in return

PACE

escalating through osmosis

scene upon scene, with the body as the curtain, drawing the eye, the finger, the mouth parting to let the next act through
occasionally, but very rarely, memory’s bite sinks too deeply into the present, pulling language back into the density of the scene and away from poetry’s elevation
- it’s then that a patchwork of whetted points is needed to make up a sensation

TOUCH

insistent / disorienting / tender

an estrangement from the world, but still bound to it as if incapable of leaving intimacy’s periphery
weighed down by an almost romantic compulsion
- the world puts its mouth on us, sees us…though not as we are
a lithe body of lyrical and narrative writing, pressed close in the dark
- snippets of a life lived from the outside, with each tissue of unnerved text slowly worked back into it
a dissociative relationship with all that moves in and out—and around—a body propelled by the desire to desire life
the stillness of that hunger is self-immolating
wrestles with a certain hopefulness that he’ll not only be found by the world in that stillness, but claimed by it
- felt most keenly when his thumb sneaks into the frame as he photographs posing strangers, hoping for his presence to be tenderized as pixelated flesh
a form of restlessness muffled by its own temperament

LATER THAT NIGHT

earned / inevitable in hindsight

everything slips into place: we find ourselves at the point where a lost lover’s absence is touched to be felt, with hands placed all over a shadow that sidesteps its own stillness

THE SLIP

a growing sense of unease with all that the speaker is capable of shedding about himself, all that he is capable of turning around to face

CAUGHT THE EYE

children kicking a used condom back and forth while screaming “jellyfish!”

WEATHERED MOOD

muted / restrained / tense

a life devoured by the lyricism of vacated pain

AFTERTASTE

clarified / hollowed, then refilled

like holding a scalded hand in the path of rushing water: a shocking reminder that there’s another moment past the flaring of nerves, another sensation beyond the cascading moment

An advance copy was provided by Tin House, an imprint of Zando.

THE NIGHT’S TURN

♜♝♝♜♛

GENRES

Poetry | LGBTQ+

PUBLICATION DATE

September 1, 2026

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