The 2024-2025 CT State Manchester Common Read text is a collection of poems that speak to themes of family history, grief, loss, memory, and American identity. These poems are at once deeply personal as Vuong reckons with the death of his mother, and communal as he writes of New England, love, and survival. The experimental form and language these poems take can be playful, pointed, and unexpected. Be open to considering why each poem takes its particular shape, just as we consider as a community how both healing and haunting can live on the page.

Reading these poems as a community invite us into discussion of shared and divergent identities and beliefs, each of which creates ways of knowing ourselves and others that is more accepting, more inclusive, and more cognizant of the need for community building today.

Vuong immigrated to Connecticut from Vietnam as a child and attended Manchester Community College at the beginning of his academic career. He received the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2017, was a 2019 MacArthur fellow, and received an honorary degree from Manchester Community College in 2023.