Ocean Vuong is an author and poet born in Saigon, Vietnam and living in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is an Associate Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass-Amherst.
In his poems, he often explores transformation, desire, and violent loss. In a 2013 interview with Edward J. Rathke, Vuong discussed the relationship between form and content in his work, noting that “Besides being a vehicle for the poem’s movement, I see form as … an extension of the poem’s content, a space where tensions can be investigated even further. The way the poem moves through space, its enjambment or end-stopped line breaks, its utterances and stutters, all work in tangent with the poem’s conceit.” Acknowledging the ever-increasing number of possible directions each new turn in a poem creates, Vuong continued, “I think the strongest poems allow themselves to collapse completely before even suggesting resurrection or closure, and a manipulation of form can add another dimension to that collapse.”
Vuong has published a poetry collection titled Night Sky with Exit Wounds in 2016, as well as the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in 2019.
Information from Vuong’s website and the Poetry Foundation.
