A Drop in the Ocean

The poet Ocean Vuong, born Vinh Quoc, was given his name shortly after immigrating to the United States when he was two. His mother named him after the Pacific to symbolize the in-between state of touching two continents without belonging wholly to either. “She’s the first poet,” Vuong says with a laugh.

True to his name, a spirit of duality courses through Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Vuong’s debut full-length book out April 5 on Cooper Canyon Press. The collection of poems traces the intersections between Buddhist philosophy, Vuong’s queerness, and his experiences as an immigrant raised by a single mother. Though rooted in heavy topics, his work resists any neat or obvious conclusions.

“In our culture, especially now during the election cycle, we are obsessed with certainty,” says Vuong, who’s 27. “I think human life—particularly for people of color, transient people, queer people—is a lot more in flux. Certainty is the death of possibility, is the death of exploration. So being an outsider, I found energy and creative power in uncertainty, in a myriad existence. My approach to art is that it could be this and that.”

Woven through landscapes of urbanity (Vuong lives in Astoria), pop culture, and violence both historical and personal, Vuong illuminates the dark edges of queerness. Take a passage from “Notebook Fragments”: “I met a man, not you. In his room the Bibles shook on the shelf / from candlelight. His scrotum a bruised fruit. I kissed it / lightly, the way one might kiss a grenade / before hurling it into the night’s mouth.”

Vuong dedicates Night Sky With Exit Wounds, in both Vietnamese and English, “for my mother [&father].” Ironically, his mother will probably never read his work. “They come from an illiterate line of rice farmers in Vietnam and so if I didn’t come to America, I might still be a rice farmer,” says Vuong, the recipient of a 2016 Whiting Award. As a result, Vuong himself didn’t learn to speak English fluently until he was 9. “I’m telling my family stories but my family cannot read it,” he says.

Vuong is preparing himself, somewhat bashfully, for a series of readings pegged to the book. He suffers from stage fright, but has cultivated a trick to push through the nervousness. “I sort of hide in my poem,” he says. The tactic hasn’t always worked. “One time, it was so awkward, I made the mistake of looking up when I said the word ‘cum shot’ and I looked directly into this elderly woman’s face and she looked completely horrified,” he says. “It was a total fail. It was the worst time to look up.”