In Ocean Vuong’s Poetry, an Ocean of Moving Elegiac Paradoxes

By Wally Suphap

Undisputedly, the years have been at once kind and brutal to Ocean Vuong. I say kind in the sense that, from a career perspective, Vuong has ascended to the peak of literary prominence at a pace and to heights few contemporary poets can match. Along the way up, he’s accrued a faithful audience, struck late-night talk-show stardom, and garnered prestigious awards, a T.S. Eliot Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, among countless others. But I also say brutal, in that violence and loss continue to plague Vuong’s life: he’s had to contend with the harsh realities of growing up in poverty, as an immigrant and former refugee from Vietnam, and as a bookish queer boy navigating through a largely unsympathetic society. 

In Time Is a Mother, his second poetry collection and his first book-length release since his New York Times bestseller On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong continues his meditations on themes of loss, grief, identity, and history. Here, it’s primarily through the prism of time’s passage. More specifically, its dual functions: how it both giveth and taketh. As the collection’s metaphoric title suggests, yes, time can be dear, loving, and nurturing. But it can also be wretched, as he brashly puts it: “Time is a motherfucker, I said to the gravestones, alive / absurd.” Never one to settle on static definitions, Vuong challenges us to reconsider what words mean, whether it’s in his native Vietnamese or in English or both, translinguistically: “In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my / eyes, the word for love is Yêu. / And the word for weakness is Yếu.” Language is always in flux and context-dependent: “How you say what you mean changes what you say.”

These poems are episodic, multiform, intimate, and aptly so, mirroring the way we carry grief and mourning. Four poems in the collection take the form of letters, such as in “Dear Sara,” a response to his seven-year-old cousin’s questions around the point of writing, and in “Dear Rose,” a thirteen-page elegy to his late mother. The latter opens with phrases that unmistakably trace back to On Earth: “Let me begin again now / that you’re gone Ma / if you’re reading this then you survived / your life into this one . . .” Other woeful poems rely on lists, repetition, and accumulation. In “Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker,”a two-year inventory of online purchases made by Vuong’s mother is used to reconstruct a portrait of her and honor the intimate memories of the mother-son relationship, with items such as “Birthday Card—Son—Pop-up Mother and Son effect” in the first year, and in the second year, as an eerie premonition, “Birthday Card—‘Son, We Will Always Be Together,’ / Snoopy design.”

The “I” in these poems stays close to Vuong’s signature underdog voice: young, modest, solitary, resilient. No longer a “Little Dog” (his namesake in On Earth), there are signs that he’s matured and hardened as a result of his losses and introspection, and grown stronger, more akin now to a “Bull,” the title of the collection’s first poem. “I was a boy— / which meant I was a murderer / of my childhood,” writes the poet, assuming an adult retrospective point of view. This voice is especially amplified in “Beautiful Short Loser”: “It ends tonight! I shouted to the cop who pulled us over for / dreaming,” says the self-proclaimed “professional loser” narrator to a police officer. The narrator continues with the rebellious banter, “I’m done talking, officer, I’m dancing / in the rain with a wedding dress & it makes sense,” before delivering the “winning” beats: 

Because I am the last of my kind at the beginning of hope. 

Because what I did with my one short beautiful life— 

was lose it 

on a winning streak. 

Vuong works hard to balance opposing forces: winning/losing, dancing/crying, birthing/killing, beauty/pain. At the macro-level, compare the dark first lines of the collection, “He stood alone in the backyard, so dark / the night purpled around him,” with the hopeful last line of the entire collection, “& I was free.” And at the micro-level, consider this couplet juxtaposing creation and destruction: “Together we made an angel / It looked like something being destroyed in a blizzard.” If there is to be a critique of this collection, it would be that we rarely get to stay long enough with a single emotion, to completely soak in the joys or sulk in the sorrows. Notes of amusement, too, are often undercut with satirical metacommentary; tones often shift from line to line, word to word. But then again, one wonders if this insistence on dualities is the poet’s way of saying, “Such is life!”

For all that this book is about personal loss, Vuong also foregrounds losses that transcend the purely private: losses instigated by atrocities against peoples and communities. In “The Punctum,” Vuong pays homage to victims of lynchings in California from 1830 to 1935, many of whom were of Mexican, Chinese, and Native American descent. It was inspired by artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching Series. Its political subject matter, and its project of resurrecting the historically neglected voices of the aggrieved in America’s sordid past, recalls the polemic poems, such as “Aubade with Burning City” and “Seventh Circle of Earth,” in his earlier collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds.

Jia Tolentino once commented that Vuong’s writing, at times, “risk[s] preciousness, but Vuong’s earnestness is overpowering.” Indeed, while some lines veer toward the overly sentimental, it’s this earnestness—and his self-awareness of it—that keeps the emotions at bay. An ace at balancing tones, Vuong is the authorial bard of paradoxes, rendering grief with utmost tenderness, violence with artistic serenity, and death with liberating force. In “Snow Theory,” he tells us: “How else do we return to ourselves but to fold / The page so it points to the good part.” There are “good parts” for sure in these pages, moments of joy, levity, and stillness. But just as often, the collection (perhaps so, too, with life) takes a turn toward darker, tragic verses. 


About the author:

Wally Suphap is a writer, lawyer, editor, and advocate. Originally from Bangkok, Thailand, and raised in San Fernando Valley, California, he holds a BA in economics and political science from Columbia College and a JD from Columbia Law School. He is currently an MFA candidate in nonfiction writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he is a Lenfest Fellow.