Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Staying Still” by Hieu Minh Nguyen

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Staying Still by Hieu Minh Nguyen, which will be published September 1, 2026 by Tin House/Zando. You can pre-order your copy here!

The highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning poetry collection Not Here, Stegner and NEA Fellow 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.

Here is the cover, designed by Lucy Kim:

Hieu Minh Nguyen: The poems in Staying Still are searching for the right word, the right song, the right color to articulate loneliness—a loneliness found while surrounded by people, a loneliness that circles my experiences as, to simplify and be wrong, an undesirable. Driven by a longing to stay, the poems in Staying Still travel through grief and wonder, through yearning and nostalgia, gathering beloveds—alive and dead, far and near—on the dance floor.

I’ve been working on the poems in this book for the last nine years. To say I entered the cover process with a few loose ideas would be downplaying just how much of a control freak I am. I had a Pinterest board. I made mock-ups of the cover image. Not unlike how some people have their drag name picked out long before they ever step on a stage—and then, once they’re finally in it, full face and hair, they realize the name no longer fits. Let’s just say: Before I was Pam, I thought I was Napalmela. And before working with Lucy Kim, I was equally convinced I knew exactly what this cover should be.

Then Lucy started sending options, and suddenly the book got bigger than my little vision for it. Her drafts didn’t flatter my expectations—they messed with them. They cracked the book open in ways I hadn’t planned for, offering new angles on the loneliness at the center of this collection. I never would have imagined anything like this as the cover before working with her, and now I truly can’t imagine it being anything else.

The image is dark and vibrant at once, erotic and melancholic. The outside gestures toward the inside in ways I didn’t expect. Each poem becomes a small room. The cover asks new questions—are we inside the room, or only looking in through a window? It makes me think about how loneliness feels from within: like the only house on the block, the only house for miles. And yet, from the outside, loneliness has neighbors. Our lonelinesses share walls.

Lucy Kim: The poems in this collection have a through-line of longing and loneliness: of self vs. other. There’s a restlessness in the narrative voice, of bodies constantly moving in the world, together but never in sync. It’s a challenging concept to convey on a cover, much less in a single still image. But what benefited me greatly is that Hieu has a background in visual arts himself and we began a dialog of sending images back and forth until, ultimately, landing on this image of apartment windows at night—familiar to any urban dweller yet made abstract by the erasing of details in its nighttime setting. There’s a musicality to the pattern in which the window lights are on or off and in different colors highlighting the different lives within . . . a striking visual metaphor for the concept of “together in separate spaces.”