10 of the Best Ocean Vuong Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The Vietnamese-born American poet Ocean Vuong is one of the most exciting new poets to emerge in the last decade or so. His poetry deals with a variety of themes, including war, family, love, and identity, with many of his poems discussing the enigmatic figure of his father.

Born in what was then Saigon in 1989, Vuong was raised in Connecticut in the United States, after his mother fled to the US when Ocean Vuong was two years old. He went on to study English at Brooklyn College in New York, and has since become a popular poet and novelist, with his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, being published in 2019.

Vuong has published several full collections of poetry: Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) and Time is a Mother (2022). But what are his best poems? We have selected some of Vuong’s greatest poems which are available online via the Poetry Foundation and Poetry Archive, but if these whet your appetite for more, both of those collections are worth getting hold of.

1. ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’.

‘Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here?’ asks Vuong in this, one of his best-known poems (he would reuse the poem’s title for his debut novel a few years later). Arranged as a series of memories, involving both the speaker’s own sexual and romantic encounters and his recollections of his father’s behaviour at home, this poem is about the brevity of all things.

2. ‘Aubade with Burning City’.

Vuong prefaces this poem with a note providing some context: the 1975 fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war, and the evacuation of US troops and Vietnamese refugees, by helicopter, out of the city.

Vuong’s own lines of verse are interspersed with snippets from the Irving Berlin song ‘White Christmas’, which was played by the Armed Forces Radio as a code signalling for the evacuation to begin. And while the destruction of Saigon is unfolding below, a man and a woman in a hotel room share champagne (although whether these are lovers, and how reciprocal the relationship is, is open to interpretation).

But as so often with Ocean Vuong’s poetry, it’s his imagery that sticks in the mind: the description, for instance, of footsteps filling the square ‘like stones fallen from the sky’.

3. ‘To My Father / To My Future Son’.

Here’s a poem about fatherhood and ‘sonhood’, or which, to put it another way, looks both forward and back at fathers and fatherhood, as Vuong addresses his own father while also looking ahead to some future day where he may be a father himself. It’s a powerful poem about the strong chain of connection linking one generation to the next.

4. ‘DetoNation’.

This is a shorter poem dealing with the same subject: Vuong’s relationship with, and attitude towards, his father. As the punning title of the poem suggests, the poet’s father is an almost explosive presence in his life, although the title also suggests ideas of nationhood and identity.

Vuong barely knew his father, who abandoned the family when Ocean was still a young boy, so his father remains an idea, a word on the page, rather than a keenly felt presence.

5. ‘A Little Closer to the Edge’.

Vuong fuses the biblical story of Adam and Eve with the relationship between his own parents in this poem. The key ingredients in the (popular telling of) the Garden of Eden story are here – the apple, the serpent – but there’s a darker undercurrent, too, as the poem is clearly informed by his father’s violence towards the poet’s mother.

6. ‘Devotion’.

This poem begins with the arrestingly ‘in medias res’ word ‘Instead’: immediately, there is a sense of being plunged into the midst of something. As the poem develops, it becomes apparent that Vuong is describing two types of ‘devotion’: the romantic (or even erotic), specifically, here, between two men; and the holy or religious.

Can romantic or sexual love attain the heights of religious worship? Vuong’s powerful description of tenderness here certainly suggests he thinks so.

7. ‘Essay on Craft’.

Many of Ocean Vuong’s most powerful poems are about the tension between restriction (which may sometimes arise from an intense effort to protect, or self-protect) and freedom.

Here, the butterfly image which opens the poem becomes a fistful of ash; we get cages and shutters, and a sense of the poet trying to find the perfect metaphor for the act of writing: that ‘craft’ which the poem’s title (which makes the poem sound like some distant descendant of an Alexander Pope poem) summons.

8. ‘Not Even This’.

One of the longer poems on this list, ‘Not Even This’ is from Vuong’s second full-length collection, Time is a Mother (2022). Beginning with a casual, even off-hand ‘Hey’, the poem is one of Vuong’s most sustained poetic explorations of identity, and specifically his own.

Incorporating something which a Brooklyn classmate once said to the poet – that Vuong was lucky because he’s gay and gets ‘to write about war and stuff’ while the classmate bemoaned, ‘I’m just white’ and so, by implication, had nothing of interest to write about – the poem is different from many of Ocean Vuong’s other poems in that it has long lines arranged into short (often one-line) stanzas: almost more like a prose poem (see its chatty style, too) than a traditional verse lyric.

9. ‘Torso of Air’.

This brief lyric is about happiness: about changing your life, cutting through the darkness of ‘night’ and carving a hole in the wall that surrounds (restricts, again?) you, to reveal the ‘eye’ of happiness looking back at you, waiting for you to take control and be happy.

But as this brief synopsis suggests (and a synopsis of an Ocean Vuong poem is always a poor second to actually reading the words of the poem itself), the success of the poem resides in the imagery used to suggest this act of what Philip Larkin, in one of his poems, termed a ‘catching of happiness’.

10. ‘Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong’.

What does it require to love oneself? With its arresting image of the poet’s ‘dead friends’ passing through him ‘like wind / through a wind chime’, this poem is a touching and heartening note from the poet to himself.

He reassures himself not to worry and not to be afraid, but this fairly simple message is delivered using imagery which is strikingly original and thought-provoking. And this poem seems to be the perfect note on which to conclude this pick of Vuong’s poems.