The Guardian Visits Forward Prize–Winner Ocean Vuong

In The Guardian's Poetry section, Claire Armitstead tells the story of Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong, the recipient of this year's Forward Prize for best first collection. Armitstead writes, "His debut collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, is the work of a man with history on his back, even if he has had to imagine some of it into being again." From there: 

He brings a mythmaker’s insistence on being seen and heard to subjects ranging from the death of Telemachus’s father, from Homeric myth, to the fall of Saigon and common-or-garden masturbation. Already festooned with awards when it arrived in the UK, the book went on to gobble up the Forward prize for best first collection.

Observer reviewer Kate Kellaway described it as “a conduit for a life in which violence and delicacy collide”, while New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani was impressed by “a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words”.

The poet mopping up all this attention is a small, androgynous figure who radiated a quiet charisma when he took to the vast stage of the Royal Festival Hall, in London, for the Forward prize readings. “Well,” he confesses later, “I don’t have any jokes and my timing is terrible, so I thought the only way to get through it was to hide in the poems. I just climbed into the book and lived there for a while.”

In his telling, Vuong’s life story begins two generations before he was born, when his American grandfather, a Michigan farm boy who “wanted to be Miles Davis”, joined the US navy with his trumpet in his backpack and was posted to Vietnam, where he fell in love with “an illiterate girl from the rice paddies”. This translates, in a piece called Notebook Fragments, as: “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me. / Yikes.”

Continue reading at The Guardian.