'Colloquial English was a Destination:' New Yorker Profiles Ocean Vuong

Born in Saigon, Ocean Vuong traveled to the United States in 1990; he grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. Although originally named Vinh Quoc Vuong, his mother renamed him Ocean when she learned its definition: "a body of water that touches many countries—including Vietnam and the United States." Vuong's debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds was published by Copper Canyon Press last week. Read the whole story at the New Yorker.

Ocean Vuong is not an experimental poet, but he is a poet of the American experiment. In “Notebook Fragments,” a long poem of questions and collisions, he writes, “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. / Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.” Then: “Yikes.” A few lines down, the speaker kisses a man’s body,

lightly, the way one might kiss a grenade
before hurling it into the night’s mouth.

Maybe the tongue is also a key.
Yikes.
I could eat you he said, brushing my cheek with his knuckles.

Vuong was born in 1988, on a rice farm outside Saigon; two years later, he and six relatives emigrated to Hartford, Connecticut, where they lived together in a one-bedroom apartment. At school, Vuong was buffeted by English long before he could use it—his family was illiterate, and he didn’t learn to read until he was eleven.

“For an American who was born here, the mundane might be boring, but for me colloquial English was a destination,” Vuong told me on a recent Tuesday evening, folded into a booth at Caffè Reggio, the Greenwich Village haunt. Now twenty-seven, he is a recent recipient of the Whiting Award, and this week the Copper Canyon Press published his first book, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds.” Two years ago, when Vuong was told over the phone that his manuscript had been accepted, he was riding the elevated train from his home in Astoria to his first workshop at New York University, where he’s about to complete his M.F.A. [...]