Why Ocean Vuong’s Poetry Feels Like It Was Written Just for You

Ocean Vuong posing during photoshoot for Cultured Magazine - Credit: Quil Lemons

Sierra Pope | Multimedia News Intern 

4-minute Read

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas – Poetry is a puzzle illuminated by moonlight. Its patterns are revealed only to those daring enough to decipher them. For the creative mind, each encounter brings a sharp rush of meaning and bliss.

Ocean Vuong, born on October 14, 1988 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is a poet who tells stories of war, trauma, queerness, and immigration. At age two, Vuong and his family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, after spending more than a year in a Philippines refugee camp.

Upon arriving in the United States, no one in his family spoke English. Vuong’s mother, who later inspired his writing, worked in a nail salon, becoming the primary source of income. She renamed her two-year-old son, Ocean Vuong, when a customer explained that the ocean bridges countries around the world.

Young Ocean Vuong and his mother posing for an image on the beach - Credit: Claire Armitstead

After graduating from high school, Vuong attended Brooklyn College, and received a bachelor’s degree in 19th-century American Literature during the early 2010s. In 2016, Vuong earned a master's degree in poetry at New York University (NYU).

“As I grew up in America, I started to see these white men experience similar struggles, where they started to fear this idea of failing at masculinity, when they are already men, but they’re failing,” Vuong stated to Viet Thanh Nguyen. “‘No homo,’ right? What happens is that you lose intimacy between men, and thus you lose the humanity that men get to express. I started to see that connection between these two spaces, and how men exist in a space.”

Vuong’s first published collection of poetry was Night Sky with Exit Wounds. The book grasped the attention of many, winning the T.S. Eliot Prize, Whiting Award, and Forward Prize.

“I think why I fell in love with poetry was that it allowed freedom in articulation,” Vuong confessed to Nguyen.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong’s first novel, highlighted themes of ancestry and otherness. Published in 2019, the story became a New York Times Best Seller and won the New England Book Award for fiction. 

In 2022, Vuong debuted his second poetry collection, Time Is a Mother, which reflected his mother’s death amid the fear and anguish of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, despite the stronghold of grief, Vuong will always cherish their most heartfelt moments, filled with love and gratitude.

“My mother doesn’t speak English, and she went to one of my readings,” Vuong told Nguyen. This was in Hartford, and we’re in the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center of all places, and the reading’s over, and I go back with her, and I see she’s crying. I said, ‘Mom? You didn’t understand, couldn’t understand. Why are you crying?’ And she said, ‘I never thought I’d live to see all these old white people clapping for my son.’”

Vuong is a living example of what it means to pour into the next generation of aspiring writers. In 2022, he joined NYU’s Creative Writing Program as a professor. Drawing from his own struggles and determination, Vuong inspires others to aim high, no matter their socioeconomic background.