That seminal time in Vuong’s life sent him on a creative exploration that has been compiled in his second poetry collection, Time is a Mother, which came out April 5, 2022. There's another level of freedom that I don't know.” But…only when their mother passes away do they realize, oh, wait a minute. “Every writer would tell you that they're writing what they want. “I realized that I was writing with various insecurities or fears, you know, even with all of my books,” he said. But it also marked an epiphany for him about his writing. “When I lost my mother, I thought, there's no point,” he told NPR. You clutched my hand, your eyes red and wet, and said, ‘I never thought I’d live to see so many old white people clapping for my son.’” The weight of that statement really sunk in when he visited her at the nail salon and watched her washing the feet of “one old white woman after another.” After, while the room stood and clapped, I walked back to my seat beside you. He wrote in that first New Yorker piece: “The first time you came to my poetry reading. Vuong's Mother’s Deathĭespite her illiteracy, Vuong’s mother Rose was his biggest supporter. I just assume that I write will come out of that filter," Vuong told TMRW magazine in an interview. "I don't sit down at the desk saying, well, I'm an LGBTQ writer. Let every kiss hit the body / like a season.” & remember, / loneliness is still time spent with the world,” and these from “ A Little Closer to the Edge”: “Let every river envy / our mouths. Among the most powerful lines is a passage from the poem “ Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” which reads, “The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed. The subjects ranged from the fall of Saigon (“Aubade with Burning City”) to the murder of a gay Dallas couple (“Seventh Circle of Earth”). It also noted the “photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.” The fanfare came quickly, with The New York Times lauding its “powerful emotional undertow” from Vuong’s “sincerity and candor,” opening up about identity and experiences as both an immigrant and gay man. Vuong’s late-night free writes were compiled in the 2016 poetry anthology Night Sky With Exit Wounds, which was published by Copper Canyon Press through an open submission contest. The cat’s out to play.” He later went on to get his MFA degree in poetry at New York University. When that editor falls asleep, I get to do what I want. “The editor in your head-the nagging, insecure, worrisome social editor-starts to retire. “You get the last word of the day,” he told the paper. At night, he found solace in writing poetry. Vuong dropped out of business school and went on to study 19th-century American literature at Brooklyn College. Vuong only lasted eight weeks there, describing the education as “learning to lie,” as he told The Guardian. Vuong vowed to make his life better than what she had gone through, so after attending Manchester Community College and transferring to Pace University to study international marketing, he decided to go to business school. The complicated multi-layered relationship with his mother may have been the result of her post-traumatic stress disorder from living in the wake of the Vietnam War and then uprooting her life to a new country. “And I think for me, you know, that freedom really was all to serve her.” Education and Finding Writing “I had ultimate freedom to explore,” he continued. Instead, she encouraged him to be happy, adding that if worse came to worst, there was always a desk at the nail salon next to her where he could also work. She gave me no pressure… There's a stereotype of the Asian tiger mom. “Everything I have done, I've done for her,” Vuong told NPR. Also in the piece, formatted as a letter to his mother, he wrote candidly about the first time his mother hit him when he was four-and the times she threw a remote control, Legos and a gallon of milk at him.ĭespite this, Vuong says his mother was his world. When he was in the third grade, he read Patricia Polacco’s Thunder Cake, which he called the “first book that I loved” in a personal essay for The New Yorker in 2017.
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