Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong, is a Vietnamese, American writer whose work often explores war, trauma, queerness, and
immigrant experience. He wrote two poetry collections: TIME IS A MOTHER and NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT
WOUNDS. Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a 2016 collection of poetry. Night Sky With Exit Wounds, he
imagines dragging his father’s body out of the sea, turning him over, and seeing a gunshot wound in his
back. In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the
aftershocks of his personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being
determined to survive beyond it. This collection won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Forward
Prize for best first collection, and a number of other honors. Several of the poems in the book depict war
and violence; indeed, one striking poem interweaves Christmas song lyrics with graphic descriptions of
the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Time Is a Mother is his second poetry collection, and was written in the aftermath of his mother’s death.
His poetry explores the themes of war, trauma, queerness, and immigrant experience. In part a
reflection on his mother’s death amid the fear and anguish of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book
portrays grief and familial loss. Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost
of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong's
poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break. These
poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating
how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Vuong earned
numerous accolades for his work, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2019.
Ocean Vuong's Time Is a Mother is a collection of 28 poems. The poems collected herein employ a range
of poetic structures, tonal registers, and temporal representations. The following summary presents a
streamlined synopsis of these works and relies upon the present tense.
The painterly opener, The Bull, sets the tone for this sense of wild abandon. The narrator of the poem is
bewitched by the bull’s beauty; its kerosene-blue eyes and fur so dark it purples the night around it. “I
had no choice. I opened the door”. In "The Bull," when a bull mysteriously appears in the speaker's yard,
he feels powerless not to confront him. When he touches the bull, he feels as if he is entering a new
realm through which he understands himself.
In, "Snow Theory," the speaker is glad that he has not hurt anyone or anything in some time. Then,
when he sees a report of violence on television, he realizes the inescapability of loss. Vuong solidifies
that the physical death of his mother will not overshadow her outline of a life lived; he will hold her and
the memories they created together in his body.
In "Dear Peter," during his stay in a rehabilitation center, the speaker thinks about his partner, Peter. He
wants Peter to know that he is wearing his socks to make himself feel better. He also wants to tell Peter
that this time he will get better and be better.
Vuong, to varying degrees, illustrates what it means to be out of control. Some of the moments feel like
stock images; playing air guitar in a backwards wedding dress as seen in Beautiful Short Loser. At the
beginning of the poem, the speaker warns the reader to stand back as he gives descriptions that
compose the eccentric energy of his persona. A war is going on in the speaker's head and he is perched
on a cliff of himself. The speaker wonders about his uncle's internal processing concerning large and
small things, cages, and movement. In an important moment in the poem, the speaker writes,
"Nobody's free without breaking open"
In "Skinny Dipping," the speaker remembers jumping from bridges as a young boy. He used to think he
would die during the jumps, but the jumps just made him feel alive. The formatting of the poem makes
it
a somewhat daunting read, from the lack of punctuation and the mid-thought line breaks to the
staggered
line placement.
In "Old Glory," a collection of voices talks about their successes. They use colloquial phrases saturated
with images of death and violence.
In "You Guys," while brushing his teeth, the speaker tells his friends he wants to help them. Then he
apologizes that his only tool and skill involves using language.
In "Dear Sara," after his cousin Sara complains about the uselessness of writing, the speaker tries to
convince her otherwise. Vuong deftly illustrates kṣaṇa — the Buddhist concept of an all-encompassing
moment by connecting "black ants crossing a white desert", to stone tablets, fossils, and greeting words
on an electronic device where he "waves" to Sara at 2:34 a.m.
In "American Legend," while the speaker and his father are driving to the clinic to put their dog down,
the speaker crashes the car, presumably killing his father. In retrospect, he wonders if he did it on
purpose to manufacture closeness with his father.
He slammed
into me &
we hugged
for the first time
in decades.
In "The Last Dinosaur," the speaker reflects on his cultural history and ancestry, wondering how they
have contributed to his identity. Vuong approaches death like an entrance rather than an ending. “I was
made to die but I’m here to stay”.
In, "Rise & Shine," after stealing his mother's tip money for drugs, the speaker makes her eggs to
preemptively atone for his sin. But it’s the candid, unphotogenic angles with bad lighting that are the
most memorable, as in Rise & Shine, where he touches on drug addiction. He thinks about the people
he has lost. When he encounters a cop, he assures the officer he is not high, but simply living outside of
time.
Scraped the last $8.48
from the glass jar.
Your days’ worth of tips
at the nail salon. Enough
for one hit.
In "The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica," the speaker watches a McDonald's worker crying in his car in
the parking lot. He imagines all the things he would say to comfort the boy. He uses vivid imagery such
as Or hitting “rock-bottom in my fast car going nowhere”, in The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica.
In "Dear T," the speaker tries to bring his late friend, T, back to life via writing. He realizes that no matter
the arrangement of the words, they will never resurrect T. Vuong meditates on language's ability to
"rewind" as a way to amend loss and reimagine the world in the poem "Dear T."
In "Waterline," the speaker presents a series of hypothetical scenarios in order to imagine a life in which
not everything is tinged with death.
In "Not Even," while riding an Amtrak train, the speaker starts crying when he sees a man standing in a
field. A nearby woman notices and comforts him. Afterwards, the speaker realizes the experience was
related to his mother's passing and the passage of time. Not Even is packed with laconic matter-of-fact
sentences that blast. He writes with an audacious energy here. Sentences such as “Some call this prayer,
I call it watch your mouth”, feel like one liner. He fills the poem with pregnant pauses, sometimes
suffixing phrases with “Ha” to inspire awkward laughter. Absurdity is in abundance in this poem, but it’s
the way Vuong uses comedic timing that surprisingly provides the most arresting and evocative
moment:
Rose, I whispered as they zipped my mother in her body bag, get out of there.
Your plants are dying.
In "Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker," the speaker presents his late mother's Amazon
order history from 21 consecutive months. The purchases trace her life from health to cancer diagnosis
to death.
In "Nothing," one day while shoveling snow and baking bread with his partner, Peter, the speaker
realizes that nothing can save their relationship.
In "Scavengers," after having sex with his lover, the speaker imagines their bodies as two fish gasping for
air on a beach.
In Part Three, "Künstlerroman," is the term used to describe the type of novel in which the main
character is an artist; in which his growth from childhood into some form of creative success as an adult is
detailed. In his poem of that name, Ocean Vuong portrays himself (‘he/the man’) pressing a rewind
button, then watching himself on film, unspool back through snippets of his life. We see it all, contained
in only a few lines awards and book-signing; parents, friends and lovers; drugs, war, love, sex and death.
Suddenly he is imagining himself crawling back into his friends' wrecked car and waiting for them to
resurrect.
In "Reasons for Staying," the speaker lists all of his reasons for remaining in his New England childhood
town.
In Part Four, "Ars Poetica as the Maker," the speaker describes why he is a writer and what writing has
given to him.
In "Toy Boat," a poem for Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was killed in 2014 by police in Ohio while
playing with a toy gun. In this poem, Vuong repeats the word toy, emphasizing Tamir’s youth and the
tragedy of his death.
In "The Punctum," the speaker's visit to the Smithsonian makes him reflect on historical erasures. Vuong
extends the idea of deceased presence or conscious remembrance to bodies that have been
systematically erased by violence and prejudice.
In "Tell Me Something Good," the speaker finds himself back in the scenes of his past with his childhood
self. He knows his childhood self longs for someone to tell him everything will be okay. The speaker's
adult self endeavors to engage the child in conversation. Tell Me Something Good” is an example of how
Vuong deftly protects his emotional balance. He needs to depersonalize his language in order to
describe his childhood.
In "No One Knows the Way to Heaven," the speaker imagines all the things he would say to his unborn
child.
In "Almost Human," the speaker recalls how language both debilitated and saved him. He wants to
believe that language has the power to change and transform.
In "Dear Rose," the speaker writes to his mother after her death. He wants her to know that their life
was beautiful. He wants his writing to mean something, and to create a space in which he can
communicate with his mother and transform himself. The succinct line arrangement and absence of full
stops in poems such as Dear Rose force you to breathe heavy, as throughout this episodic poem Vuong
talks tenderly to his dead mother about her journey as an immigrant from Vietnam to the US. Color is
important in this poem. Pink, red, blue, amber, brown, white and black recur, each with a range of
connotations, as if the disparate elements of the poem are tied together with colored threads. He fills
the poem with vivid imagery: flying bullets, corpses, Wonder Bread dipped in condensed milk and the
fermentation of fish. He also wonders if she’s still illiterate:
you bought me pencils reader I could
not speak so I wrote myself into
silence where I stood waiting for you Ma
to read me do you read me now
In "Woodworking at the End of the World," the speaker is resurrected from the dead. He lies back
down, waiting for something to happen. After a little boy approaches and forgives the speaker, the
speaker thinks of his life and feels free.