Other titles by this author
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by
A New York Times bestseller * Nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction * Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling "A lyrical work of self-discovery that's shockingly intimate and insistently universal...Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post "This is one of the best novels I've ever read...Ocean Vuong is a master. This book a masterpiece."--Tommy Orange, author of There There and Wandering Stars On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. Named a Best Book of the Year by: GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and more!
Call Number: STACKS PS3622.U96 O52 2019Publication Date: 2019
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by
One of the most celebrated poetry books of the year: The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016 New York Times, Critics Pick Boston Globe, Best Books listing NPR, Best Books listing Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year Library Journal, Best Books of 2016 Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times writes: "The poems in Mr. Vuong''s new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds...possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson''s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his words...There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong''s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things." "Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. His poems are by turns graceful and wonderstruck. His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion."--The New Yorker "The language is painfully, exquisitely exact, the scenes haunting and indelible.... Highly recommended."--Library Journal, starred review "Night Sky with Exit Wounds establishes Vuong as a fierce new talent to be reckoned with...This book is a masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence."--Buzzfeed''s "Most Exciting New Books of 2016" "This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level...A stunning introduction to a young poet who writes with both assurance and vulnerability. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world."--2016 Whiting Award citation "Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the kind of book that soon becomes worn with love. You will want to crease every page to come back to it, to underline every other line because each word resonates with power."--LitHub "Vuong''s powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identity--all with a tremendous humanity."--Slate "In his impressive debut collection, Vuong writes beauty into--and culls from--individual, familial, and historical traumas. Vuong exists as both observer and observed throughout the book as he explores deeply personal themes such as poverty, depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the various forms of violence inflicted on his family during the Vietnam War. Poems float and strike in equal measure as the poet strives to transform pain into clarity."--Publishers Weekly Torso of Air Suppose you do change your life. & the body is more than a portion of night--sealed with bruises. Suppose you woke & found your shadow replaced by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful & gone. So you take the knife to the wall instead. You carve & carve until a coin of light appears & you get to look in, at last, on happiness. The eye staring back from the other side-- waiting. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong attended Brooklyn College. He is the author of two chapbooks as well as a full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. A Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City.
Call Number: READ ONLINEPublication Date: 2016
Burnings by
Poetry. Asian American Studies. LGBT Studies. The poems of BURNINGS explore refugee culture, be the speaker a literal refugee from a torn homeland, or a refugee from his own skin, burning with the heat of awakening eroticism. In this world, we're all refugees from something. As two-time National Slam Champion Roger Bonair-Agard says: "Ocean manages to imbue the desperation of his being alive—with a savage beauty. It is not just that Ocean can render pain as a kind of loveliness, but that his poetic line will not let you forget the hurt or the garish brilliance of your triumph; will not let you look away. These poems shatter us detail by detail because Ocean leaves nothing unturned, because every lived thing in his poems demands to be fed by you; to nourish you in turn. You will not leave these poems dissatisfied. They will fill you utterly."
Call Number: STACKS PS3622.U564 M9 2010Publication Date: 2010
No by Call Number: ON ORDERISBN: 9781936919222Publication Date: 2013
Biography
"Vuong's evocative first name is one that his mother informally bestowed on him in childhood as a word that could connect her Vietnamese immigrant child to the birthplace she missed. He was born Vinh Quoc Vuong on October 14, 1988, in Ho Chi Minh City, the one-time capital of the former South Vietnam and formerly known as Saigon.
Vuong was born 13 years after the end of the Vietnam War but it both shaped his family and created an opportunity for them to safely leave: Rose, his mother, was barely 20 years old when he was born and was the daughter of a US Navy service member who had married Vuong's paternal grandmother. That American grandfather had returned to the United States for a short visit but was unable to reenter the Southeast Asian country when the Vietnam War ended suddenly and calamitously in the spring of 1975...
When Vuong was still an infant the family's half-American status was discovered and they were forced to flee the country. Aid workers affiliated with the Salvation Army assisted Vuong's mother, grandmother, his Vietnamese father, and other family members on the first leg of their journey to a refugee camp in the Philippines, where they spent several months before they were resettled in Hartford, Connecticut. Unmoored by the dramatic uprooting, Vuong's father eventually left the family and Vuong was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked as a nail technician..."
Excerpt from: "Ocean Vuong." Newsmakers Online, Gale, 2020. Gale In Context: Biography, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1618007048/BIC?u=ctstate&sid=bookmark-BIC&xid=07414fa7. Accessed 3 June 2024.
Ocean Vuong
Writings and Interviews
- PBS NewsHour: Ocean Vuong's Brief But Spectacular Take on Grief and Language"Time Is a Mother" is Ocean Vuong's second collection of poems... A winner of major literary prizes and a MacArthur Fellowship, Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death. He shares his brief but spectacular take on "reclaiming language for joy."
- DiveDapper: “We're singing of solitude, but we're singing it to one another.”Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong discuss growing up in Vietnam, being a child of war, and how his poems reflect his experiences growing up. They also delve into Vietnamese culture and Vuong's family life.
- A Vessel for Peace: An Interview with Writer Ocean VuongKameelah Janan Rasheed and Ocean discuss Ocean youth, growing up with strong women. They explore Ocean's religion, culture, and country.